I don't use apex. I use serverless. but it's probably the same idea. All the work of transpiling, minifing, creating lambdas, api gateway, aws resources, stages etc... are done automatically from the command line. You don't need to compile/transpile your code, create a zip, upload to s3, create a lambda import the zip from s3, create the endpoint, connect to the lambda, create the api gateway template, etc... And do this every time you change something in your code. It gets frustrating really fast when doing it manually.
Once you get beyond "just started" you'll see the value of these tools :-) The charm of Lambda is that it's easy to get rolling, but then the AWS complexity seeps in. This helps deal with a _lot_ of that in a pretty sane way.
The AWS UI and console are great for <10 functions. 100 functions... not so much. It becomes necessary to automate things and Apex provides that. If you are just getting started, I'm not sure it is "better". But if your entire stack is lambda funcs its almost necessary to keep your sanity.