Are people still building network labs manually or is everyone automating this now?

Hi everyone, I have been rebuilding a few practice environments lately for routing/switching and honestly I feel like I’m spending more time creating labs than actually testing configs.

I’ve used EVE-NG and GNS3 for years and recently started looking into some newer AI-assisted stuff like Netpilot that can apparently generate multi-vendor labs with real CLIs.

I am curious to know what network engineers here are using these days for realistic practice/testing environments. Are you still manually building topologies or using tools that automate a lot of the setup now?

The main thing I care about is realistic CLI behavior and not spending half my evening wiring virtual devices together.