I missed the manual config at first, and being able to quickly fix things, but it turns out it's not so bad, and I think because of:

1 - Most setups are done once

2 - Stability and quality has improved in recent years, and you don't have to fix or mess with it as much

That said, I very much like being able to edit the yaml for automations and the lovelace UI. I like being able to flip back and forth between visual and code from the UI itself. Best of both worlds, especially because there's a lot of automations that are like 60% copied from another one. Being able to use a text editor (that has autocomplete!) to change entity names as opposed to clicking through several layers of UI for each one is awesome.