Or you can use the service account to avoid dancing around gcloud and others.
But I agree Google has a problem building stuff for us common humans who do not work at the big G.
It seems like they get a bunch of engineers to come and build stuff then once they move on, the project is abandoned or poorly maintained until another team of engineers come and try to rebuild it from scratch.
Here's more proof, Google Wallet for example ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9498475