Software engineering would've been much easier for me had I known what I know now. I just published an article going over a few of the things that really made a difference to my learning journey so you can have an easier ride!
As a student trying out the AWS platform (I'm not even a devops/backend/anything related to it) I found it painful to use when compared to other providers. They keep building new products that build on existing products such as Elastic Beanstalk that assigns a LOT of resources you don't even need to host a nodejs app, etc. Even reaching the billing panel was painful. You have to go through at least 3 screens just to get to the "billing" screen. And then you have to browse inside of that to reach your bills. It's disgusting.