A "ton" of work may have been an exaggeration.

Maintaining a CA (and dealing with cert rotation) is some work.

Other things are indeed just a flag or config option (like jumphosts). But it takes work for a sysadmin/devops to educate all engineers in the company and make sure everyone uses the correct setup and doesn't end up dropping authorized_keys around random servers.

It's not that difficult technically as it is socially.