Plenty of users find editing configs in a text editor very friendly. Changing away from that would be LESS friendly to those users. Which users are most important to be friendly to?
Neither of these is a complete answer, but
1. Distros like NixOS and GuixSD address this successfully by emitting the config files themselves. They don't statefully edit your configs but instead store them in their own language and then translate them as wholes.
2. You can mitigate much of the pain of this with something like etckeeper, which essentially gives you version control for /etc.