Most software architecture diagrams are a mess ... partly due to ad hoc notation, and partly because it's very unclear what the boxes represent. C4 resolves the latter problem by introducing a small number of predefined abstractions. This sounds limiting, but the power of C4 is that limited set of abstractions, and the conversations it forces architects/developers to have.
> Thank you, but by that argument, I could that for any diagramming / whiteboarding tool.
In theory, sure, but the majority of diagramming/whiteboarding tools are not easily manipulated via code/an API. Structurizr is a modelling tool, and the model can be authored by a number of methods ... manual authoring, reverse-engineering, or a hybrid of the two.
> The point is having a tool that reduces work for me and does these things automatically.
I do hope that we will see some tooling that can do these things automatically, but we're not there yet ... fully-automatic (as opposed to semi-automatic) comes with some serious trade-offs.
> Take Structurizr for example, it doesn't automatically create the diagrams for you
The Structurizr DSL is designed for manual authoring (which is what most people tend to do), but there's nothing preventing you from writing some code (using one of the many open source Structurizr compatible libraries) to reverse-engineer parts of the software architecture model from source code, binaries, your deployment environment, logs, etc.
> or notify you when it detects architectural drift
If you do the above, there's then nothing preventing you from writing some tests to notify of architectural drift, etc.
The less prescriptive approach of LikeC4 sounds very appealing, because it provides a way to define your own abstractions. But I don't recommend this approach for most teams -> https://c4model.com/abstractions/faq#can-we-add-more-abstrac...