That’s fair. I’m not a brms user myself, so I cannot be as helpful with that. But there any many users of brms, and maybe they can give you more specific input. brms is a great tool, and it can be more convenient to use it instead of the Stan language, but it also allows you to skip some details that can be helpful in understanding the full model, and with it also not allow some tweaks (or not as easily) to it.
My personal view is that the Stan language itself is normally not much of a barrier for anyone with some programming skills, especially if you are fairly comfortable with R (C is another one it resembles in some aspects). The bigger hurdle is being able to specify the model components from the ground up, the likelihood usually being the more complicated piece of it. In addition to the forum, Stan now has a language server, and specific plugins as well as the common widesperead LLM assistants will probably be able to help writing and debugging a Stan language program.
Again, that’s not to say that one or the other is inherently better, but I think users of more “friendly” interfaces shouldn’t be discouraged of using the Stan language directly.