No CLI, is Grav still good for shared hosting?

This is theme-centred question, but it's general support I believe, which is why it's here.

I think I might have chosen the wrong CMS. In each theme, including the manual, Grav includes CLI options for installation, and (must have passed it?) Doesn't include the built-in option for installing a theme, from inside the theme options inside the Grav GUI. When I install a theme from there, it installs, but doesn't seem to take affect appropriately, because the look of the site doesn't really change.

Now I'm not afraid of CLI and even some coding. I work with commands both at work and at home, in Windows, MacOS, and Windows. But when I picked up a site (shared hosting) I was under the impression I need php based plan and that's it - you know, of it can run WordPress, it should be able to run Grav.

I don't understand. How do you change a theme on a "common" shared hosting plan that doesn't include CLI? Where is it documented? Why doesn't the manual cover it? What's going on.

I'm a bit shaken, but I'll be more than happy to learn and start somewhere. Grav looks great, but it feels like I need a manual before I need the manual. Can someone point me in the right direction, please?

Well the CLI is not doing any "magic", it only changes some files, maybe adds some files too. You could of course change them manually. Or even better develop the site on your local computer and the just upload it all to webserver through ftp. All configurations will be transfered. The configs are in /user/config btw

While Grav can be used without a CLI, it's really handy to have. Especially if you run into problems or mess things up. Frankly, if I were forced to use a hosting provider that didn't have a CLI, I would do ALL development and even updates on another machine and simply sync my changes to the live site using Git, or FTP sync or something similar. But that's just me, I like having complete control over my site, and frankly don't like jumping through hoops on a remote system to do something that is very simple on a local setup.

I actually found out the same about my webhosting - ssh is possible, but not using Grav CLI Command line support (php seems to be the problem here). Should I better decide now for a different CMS or should I just go along with diving into GRAV and develop everything on the local machine?

I was about to work through the theme tutorial https://learn.getgrav.org/themes/theme-tutorial, where it says

For this next step you really do need to be in the command line as the DevTools provide a couple of CLI commands to make the process of creating a new theme much easier!

So what would you recommend?

if you can access via SSH, then you probably can use PHP from the command line, it's just a matter of finding the right executable and adding it to your path. Here's an example of how to do it on Crucial hosting: https://learn.getgrav.org/webservers-hosting/shared/crucial#setup-cli-php

I have been playing with it on my shared hosting @ Krystal. They allow jailed ssh access and I had no problems.