Calling it a mess is unfair. It's actually quite straightforward, and the documentation (see sibling comment) guides you through the pros and cons. For example

Calling it a mess is unfair. It's actually quite straightforward, and the documentation (see sibling comment) guides you through the pros and cons. For example, if you run with streaming replication — the recommended approach for most setups — then you can decide to enable WAL logs or not. If you only want replication, and not point-in-time recovery, then just running with WAL-less streaming replication is extremely simple and straightforward.