GitHub repo settings configuration as code

I'm looking for the best way to allow engineers at my company (1,500 engineers) to manage their GitHub repo settings via "configuration as code". The GitHub repo settings UI webpage requires elevated permissions. The UI is not a good solution for us - we have compliance requirements as well as a general need to reduce chaos and to enforce a reasonable workflow with approvals.

From what I can tell, most companies are building their own solutions with Terraform or Pulumi.

Is there something that's clearly the best solution for doing this? One thing I've come to learn is that developers don't like Terraform because of high cognitive load, and that when Terraform changes are in someone's way, it becomes the leading cause of loss of productivity.

Having not found something that feels easy to use, I'm wondering if I should possibly start an open source project that would help make it easy for any company to allow their developers to configure their GitHub repos settings as code.