Hi @hulfred,
Thanks for posting! We plan to provide more artifact API tutorials in the future, including expanding all existing command-line interface tutorials to cover the equivalent commands in artifact API. For now, this tutorial gives a primer on artifact API and should give some sense of the equivalent artifact API command for various actions. Furthermore, artifact API documentation exists for all available plugins (just click on the action of interest and click the artifact API tab ). So that should help you get started using artifact API.
All that said, the command-line interface is the easiest way for users to get started who want to use QIIME2 for analysis. Learning unix/linux commands is not even necessary to get started, though learning the basics on navigating directory structure would help.
Good luck!