Not to mention the dynamic alias records, automated certificate validations and auto-renewing, and the very excellent integrations with other AWS services.

People like making life harder for themselves /shrug

If disaster recovery or separation of duties makes you shrug, I’d recommend some basic risk management and security training.

Most decent registrars have APIs allowing you to do all of this with just a few lines of code in a script.

You can use ACM for free without Route 53, it just takes manual effort to set up verification records.