Good point. In fact, my cloud experience starts with Heroku, which is only a few-click deployment. I am learning more about cloud environments from a developer perspective, so I choose GAE because it is a direct PaaS equivalent to Heroku Dynos (with like 10x steps to set up though 😂).
Going over your articles, that's definitely some experience. I agree that troubleshooting in the GAE production environment is really troublesome due to its obscure error messages and logging. It appears we can now simulate the App Engine production environment on the local machine for testing purposes, but I have not tried it though.