My recommendation for that sort of use would be to look at using a 'management layer' app that sits above QEMU and handles all the fiddly command line details for you -- https://virt-manager.org/ (which uses/is part of libvirt) is a popular one, I think. The QEMU project has kind of settled on the philosophy of being the low-level tool which provides you "full manual control" and interfaces for a higher-level UI to make use of. User-friendliness is not really our forte and so we let other projects provide that part.
This is the context I was missing when I switched to QEMU. I had not heard about libvirt. A simple "apt search qemu" had shown a few unsatisfying GUIs, but nothing about other layers above qemu.
I suggest QEMU's documentation could mention libvirt and its user-friendly interfaces.
FWIW, QEMU's upstream README does mention libvirt and higher-level managment tools:
"QEMU aims to fit into a variety of use cases. It can be invoked directly by users wishing to have full control over its behaviour and settings. It also aims to facilitate integration into higher level management layers, by providing a stable command line interface and monitor API. It is commonly invoked indirectly via the libvirt library when using open source applications such as oVirt, OpenStack and virt-manager."
But I get it, not everyone goes in search of a README buried in a Git repository. I myself am not sure if this REAMDE is rendered in an HTML format somewhere.
[1] https://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=blob_plain;f=README
Modern GUI for QEMU: https://gitlab.com/qtemu
Note that libvirt isn't Qemu-specific; it supports multiple backends, including VirtualBox and Xen.