How long did it take you to go from "making a new server / copying configs is fine" to "this is tedious enough I'd like to abstract it?"

Like, was it a years-long journey or is this the type of thing that becomes immediately obvious once you start working w/ N servers or something?

I'm trying to learn the space between "physical machines in my apartment" and "cloud-native everything" and that's led me to the point where I'm happily using cloud-init to configure servers and running fun little docker compose systems on them.