If you have a base familiarity with the command line, I think many build tools do have great basic defaults, e.g. `dotnet run`, `cargo run`, `npm run dev`, etc.

If you have a base familiarity with the command line, I think many build tools do have great basic defaults, e.g. `dotnet run`, `cargo run`, `npm run dev`, etc. Vite is another example of good defaults in frontend dev; it allows you to sidestep a lot of the difficulty one may run into with webpack. But I think you're right in many ways though. For seasoned devs, cli tools give a lot of flexibility and allow dev tasks to be automated in pipelines more easily, but it requires one to read documentation or use the help subcommand to discover what else you can do. Which is not a big deal when you are experienced, but I definitely remember struggling early on with things like that when I was self-teaching how to program.