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On the other hand, having to do things manually gives you a good overview of how it all works.

A magic script is great if you’re a user of the tools/software it installs but if you’re a developer you’ll sooner or later need the knowledge of how the thing works.

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A magic script is great even if you are the developer who need the knowledge of how thr thing works. It is a single entry point which you can start reading and understanding.

I like to call these just "scripts" without the magic. Magic scripts install a bunch of stuff and configure your machine, but don't tell you what they're doing at all. This stuff infuriates, because the next thing I know I have an OpenJDK11 on my computer for seemingly no reason. What you really want is a script, so you can just directly run it, but it tells you what it is doing and why you need the thing. "I'm going to set up Kerberos so I can push to our Git instance"? That's what I want to see somewhere that's not just "oh you can find this in the 17th zip file we download and execute on your machine".

Presumably you can just inspect the magic script when you need to

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