The equivalent of “AWS Consultants” who are just a bunch of old school netops people who passed one multiple choice certification. All they can do is duplicate an on prem infrastructure on AWS doing a lift and shift and costing their client more for the privilege.

That doesn’t mean the APIs aren’t first class citizens.

If you go watch Channel 9 (Official MS) training videos, outside of the let’s get setup videos, the devs and presenters are almost always using the APIs to interact with Azure either through Powershell or Visual Studio.