The interesting thing is that it lets you develop against your real infrastructure. This speeds up your iteration cycle drastically when compared to the other serverless tools.

But I do feel your pain, building a CI/CD for serverless is quite annoying and is a big waste of time for startups. I would not recommend it.

And quite frankly serverless as an ecosystem needs to be improved before it can compete with app engine, when it comes to developer experience. We care a great deal about it and that's what we are working on.