It's supposed to work just by extracting the .zip or .tar into the 'public_html' directory. At least that was my experience, I run it from the cheapest cPanel shared hosting I could find (the ones of $3/month). My cPanel shared hosting provider also provides me with SSH access, and I got used to it as well.
I could have gone with the VPS route, but the typical cPanel hosting come with sensible defaults that just works like it's supposed to.
What I did was to download one of these skeletons (prefilled with data) and start from there. It's almost 99.9% guaranteed to work that way.
The Admin plugin helps a lot to reduce that obscurity you mention.
Full disclosure: I'm not a PHP developer as well, I know nothing from it, I only know Python, some C++11 onwards and Delphi.
After 40 minutes of error message after error message, and googling obsure PHP dev tools/practices, I just quit.
So yes, use Grav, if you already deep in PHP world.