It's a mixed bag. It's more standardised, so once you know how to set up one app, you can mostly just repeat it multiple times as needed. Even for custom things, I can't remember the last time I started a CloudFormation stack from scratch - it's mostly copy&customise.

Being able to say "I want a clustered MySQL here with this kind of specs" is much better (time-wise) than doing it on your own. The updates are also nicely wrapped up in the system, so I'm just saying "apply the latest update" rather than manually ensuring failovers/restarts happen in the right order.

So you pay to simplify things, but the gain from that simplification only kicks in with larger projects. If you have something in a single server that you can restart while your users get an error page, it may not be worth it.