At what point is there something beyond a framework - a SaaS in a box perhaps, that just avoids many of these basic problems (oh and the HR, legal, etc problems) of starting a startup. Startups are not snowflakes apart from that one little core competency. In short most serial founders say the second one was easier, simply because they followed the template ground out in the first.

Would it be easier to start with that template?

Saas Pegasus (https://www.saaspegasus.com/) for Python/Django, Bullet Train (https://bullettrain.co/) and JumpStart (https://jumpstartrails.com/) for Rails, Spark (https://spark.laravel.com/) for Laravel, Gravity (https://usegravity.app/) for JS

You can find an even bigger list here: https://github.com/smirnov-am/awesome-saas-boilerplates though those are the market leaders (I make one of them and follow things closely)