I second this! I have a shell script to download if necessary Debian, run its installer with setting matching production and then run VM with necessary development directories exposed to it. I tried initially to do that with virsh, but then I gave up. Raw qemu commands in fact rather straightforward indeed.
Yeah, if you have a few virtual machines for specific purposes, there's not much point bothering with some abstraction on top of qemu.
I also have just a few 20 line scripts to run my VMs, and that's all. Works with no changes/hassle for 5 years already or more. No extra SW to learn. Man qemu gives me all the answers. Easy.
I guess if you want to manage some complicated setup and dynamically add/remove disks, network cards, or whatever, all the time, migrate machines, etc., some solution like virsh would be good, but for having everything on one bridge, in one subnet, to run some throwaway VM with Windows/browsers for web testing, the simpler setup is so nice.
Another nice guide is on ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU.
https://drewdevault.com/2018/09/10/Getting-started-with-qemu...
I stopped bothering with libvirt and other frontends for local dev environments. Now I use shell scripts to start my VMs. I only create one per month or two so it isn't that much of a hassle.