Self-flagellation in the name of learning

It bothers me that to be the "ultimate" software engineer, I need to learn cloud platforms like AWS. Granted, the setup for connecting my domain to Fargate that I did today with OpenTofu was pretty painless, at least in comparison to GCP Cloud Run, which is extremely stupid to work with for unknowable reasons. Still though - aren't these cloud services meant to make things easier? If I really wanted to deploy something fast, I would go on Vultr, spin up a VM, install Tailscale and Docker, set up a GHA workflow to build, push, and SSH in and run docker pull and run, and point Cloudflare to it. Genuinely would take me maybe two hours at most, maybe 30 minutes if I have a NixOS configuration connected to my tailnet already that I can deploy. Instead, wiring up my domain has taken around 5-6 hours of work and I barely have a grasp on what exactly is going on, AND I haven't even set up auto deploying a new revision on push to main. The only reason I feel like I have to do it this way at least once is that unfortunately it is the industry standard, and I do want to have my site production ready, at the very least so I can show it off to employers (because none of my friends even know what an ECS cluster is). This feels... abnormal. All I hope is that one day, one hiring manager is going to be impressed enough that this will be made worth it. Regardless though, I am forcing myself to do everything in the most correct and declarative way possible, so ideally I will never have to do this again - I will have my perfect code sitting in my repo for me to shamelessly copy, and this time, I'll actually understand it. That's all I really have to say today - see ya tomorrow!