I do get frustrated when other people jump in to in effect say "jeeze, three days, what are you doing wrong?"
I sent my work Macbook into Apple for a keyboard replacement, which naturally means they have to wipe the SSD, as one does with keyboard replacements. Setting it up again meant replicating three years of cruft that I had long since forgotten about. Its been a month since I did this, and I'm still not up to the level it was before.
Password manager, check. Both the native 1Password and browser extensions. Speaking of browsers, need to install both Firefox and Chrome for testing. Brew? Ok. AWS, gotta configure new access credentials there, now lets install the aws-cli, oh its not available in a package manager, cool. Node, Go, Rust, Elixir, ok now maybe my git repositories? Oh, git isn't installed, lets install xcode, and there's a system update, that'll take about 25 minutes. Didn't I have a command to quickly switch kubernetes contexts? Lets see if I snippeted that somewhere, actually I guess i need to install eksctl and kubectl now. Don't forget email sign-in, calendar sign-in, gotta install slack, iterm, VSCode, jeeze I remember VSCode being a lot more productive, yup I'm missing about twenty extensions.
This stuff is really, really hard to automate; not because its technically hard to automate, though in some cases it is, but its shit I do, like, once every three years. No one automates things they do three times a decade. Cloud or local server system image backups can help, but I'm not giving Apple a full system image for Time Machine to use, there's too much sensitive data on this machine. Its just hard! And that's ok.