I think you're underestimating the skill required to do it that well. Add 1 wrong feature and suddenly your simple project working around a DX tarpits is a new tarpit.

A lot of devs like building features.

To be fair, almost zero people praise the dx for ffmpeg. but the utility and value is so massively high, that it overcomes the famously complex dx of ffmpeg. I'm not even insulting ffmpeg, if it does a million things, then there are going to be a million knobs.

I think of git as the same. The git cli is not intuitive at all (unless that lightbulb goes off) but the utility is so good, that people just kind of suck it up and use it.