Obviously setting up Mapnik locally is hard, and people wanted to download OSM tiles with a proper UI.
In 2011 I took over the development of JTileDownloader, which does exactly that. Bulk downloading was frowned upon even then. I tried to ease the load: imposed a 5 tiles/sec limit and altered downloading order to meta-tiles (8x8 tile packs).
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JTileDownloader
Still, @osm_tech don't care, JTD was banned by user-agent, and people returned to anonymous bulk downloaders with no safeguards.
And back to my projects from days back, that still operate. In the same trend, seeing something and improving on it, I took Frederik's BigMap and added an online tile-stitching service.
https://bigmap.osmz.ru/
The UI is the same, still bad, but it's the easiest way to get a raster map for an area. And also georeferencing files for OziExplorer or QGIS. Many people use it daily.
I see how it could be made better, faster and easier, but as always, not enough time. And no alternatives haha.