I grew up in the private server scene for a popular MMO and you're absolutely right. It was a whole lot of teenagers with energy drinks grinding through reverse-engineering minutia that adults would gawk at and make excuses to avoid doing.
That said there was a lot of automation, scripts, and other tooling, to make it easier. The best were able to i.e. update a private server automatically when the base game updated. We were doing automation at a higher level then F500 companies were at the time (mid 2000s) and we were just kids.