I don't know that it's accurate, but at the beginning, it felt like using certbot was the only supported way to use ACME/LE, and it really wanted to do stuff as root and restart your webserver whenever.

Or you could run Caddy which had a built in ACME client, but then you're running an extra daemon.

apache_mod_md eventually came along which works for me, but it's also got some lazy things (it mostly just manages requesting certs, you've got to have a frequent enough reload to pick them up; I guess that's ok because I don't think public Apache ever learned to periodically check if it needs to reopen access logs when they're rotated, so you probably reload Apache from time to time anyway)

Before that was workable, I did need some certs and used acme.sh by hand, and it was nicer than trusting a big thing running in a cron and restarting things, but it was also inconvenient becsause I had to remember to go do it.

> I don't know that it's accurate, but at the beginning, it felt like using certbot was the only supported way to use ACME/LE, and it really wanted to do stuff as root and restart your webserver whenever.

It's fair to say that on day one the only launch client was Certbot, although on that day it wasn't called "Certbot" yet so if that's the name you remember it wasn't the only one. Given that it's not guaranteed this will be a success (like the American Revolution, or the Harry Potter books it seems obvious in hindsight but that's too late) it's understandable that they didn't spend lots of money developing a variety of clients and libraries you might want.