That seems nuts to me. I'm not sure how you fix it without being Amazon/Google. People moan about Terraform too before that gets mentioned.
I'd really like to understand more about what the pain points are here. In contrast to your experience I spend almost no time deploying code. We commit, tests run, we click a button and the deployment is updated in our kubernetes cluster. We did have to put a fair bit of work into our gitlab pipelines and the tooling that patches config into our kubernetes manifests and depoys them to the right place (let's say 2 person months all-in), but the payoff in the end was pretty significant. We're a fairly small company so if we could afford to put the time in to build the foundation for painless deployment I wonder what prevents larger orgs from doing this work? Is it access to the right skills? Difficulty prioritizing non-revenue tasks?
The last project I worked on was deployed to two different environments (double the headache in itself). One side required AWS CloudFormation (requirement imposed on us for that side to be serverless) which we were new to, so we brought in three different specialists one after another. None of whom could really help other than to tell us it was messy and confirm that we were on the right track.
There was a time when I'd just drop a jar and an init script on a linux box for an MVP, now I'm looking up what the yaml should be for sticking a lambda in a VPC, or adding security groups to EC2 instances or whitelisting CloudFront access IP addresses. And redeploys involving CloudFront are slooow. I think that project must have used a dozen AWS services and a few thousand lines of CloudFormation - for deploying perhaps half that many lines of code.
Honestly most of the effort was not in the gitlab pipelines. We found those facilities easy enough to understand and implement. Most of the work went into the tooling layer between gitlab and our runtime environment. My email is in my profile if you'd like to reach out with more specific questions.
We've still got a lot to build, but the goal is zero config deployment for any app/service.
Nothing radical. Just a managed service provider that would build and maintain the CI/CD pipeline for them.