No AWS _is_ hard. It's hard. They're all hard. They require tons and tons of knowledge before understanding what to look at, how to use it, when to use it, etc. Everyone who thinks these systems are simple completely take for granted the years and years of knowledge they've acquired. Even in the form of shared vocabulary, AWS is insane. IAM is a whole other nightmare of complexity that is insanely powerful, but I wouldn't dare point anyone in that direction if they were just starting out.
I’ve found AWS services individually to be straightforward but the UI is full of unintuitive menus so you always end up having to google “how to x on AWS”. Also understanding how to make the services interact takes a fairly high level of networking knowledge.
