It absolutely improves with practice, and once you have settled on an aesthetic you like you can simply reuse the code, e.g. store all your color/line properties in a variable and just update each figure with that variable

My thesis had something like 30 figures, and at multiple points I had to do things like "put these all on a log scale instead" or "whoops, data on row 143,827 looks like it was transcribed wrong, need to fix it"

While setting everything up in ggplot took a couple hours, making those changes to 30 figures in ggplot took seconds, whereas it would have taken a monumental amount of time to do manually in excel