> Gemini is the absolute worse when it comes to key management.

I saw another comment thread on this recently. What I gathered was they hid it in the Cloud Platform, so for those who jumped the cloud hoops already, maybe it's alright. (However when I read what Openrouter offers, as you just laid out, I feel Google can't hold a candle to Openrouter DevEx.)

However, if there's anyone who is aware, was there a brief point where getting a Gemini API key was simple (enough)? I'm asking because, in true Google fashion, the AI product went through a lot of changes.