The former sounds like a makefile, and the latter sounds like a Terraform plan (perhaps combined with something like Kubernetes manifests, but that’s getting more architecture-specific). These days I don’t think there’s any excuse to use the point-and-click approach for setting up infrastructure: it’s effortful, bug-prone, a security hazard, means everyone has to be trained in yet another area, and risks accidentally spending far more money than you intend (either by using surprisingly expensive services like Spanner, or by inadvertently leaving unused infrastructure running).
That said, I do agree that platforms like AWS are unnecessarily complex for the vast majority of CRUD web developers. The complexity makes sense for the small percentage of people who are genuinely setting up a very idiosyncratic and unique architecture, but the 98% of CRUD developers really need an opinionated platform, perhaps built on top of AWS/GCP/Azure and modelled on v1 platforms like Heroku, which would set up the infrastructure you need for the average web backend.