As an avid plantuml user, I don't think it's that simple. Graph layouts help, but it doesn't take long for automatic layouts to start to get in the way of conveying meaning, and that's even with a higher level description language, like plantuml or mermaid, let alone with raw graphviz. One can quickly start to spend more time trying to make the layout look right than actually evolving it.

Don't have a solution to it, unfortunately. When things in my head start to map too poorly to plantuml, I just consider drawio instead, but it's such a downgrade, that I try to avoid as much as I can.