I still have to log in via fucking RDP to set it up.
Nah you don't. I've made plenty of headless installations for windows. You think everyone with a datacenter with hundreds of windows servers logs in to each of them with RDP? You can do it with an unattended.xml file. Which is harder to do than what I had to do to make a headless raspberry pi ubuntu server. By a lot, although if you look long enough, you might be able to copy someone else's unattended.xml.
Also, Windows Event Viewer still blows
Yeah, it's... an acquired taste. You can actually script it. But it is harder than string manipulation, since the events are all objects, not strings.
Then why has every Windows admin I’ve ever had to deal with use the GUI?