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We had to encode a lot of videos at work once to play back to users. The resulting FFMPEG commands ended up being so complicated, every argument had about a one paragraph comment explaining it

Had to try and fix a bug with that script and it took me hours just to get some understanding of it.

Makes me wonder if video processing is just that complicated, or if someone could make some sort of simpler tool for this

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There's simpler tools like Handbrake that present a GUI for handling many video encoding tasks, or even things like Tdarr for distributed transcoding tasks.

But if you're documenting it right then you'll still need a paragraph explaining what every checkbox does...

ffmpeg should be config-based with verbose descriptive names for everything. It doesn't make sense in its CLI form. It's far from human-readable since a very long time.

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