Sure, learning basics of regex is not that hard, but complex regex expressions can easily become impenetrable. I actually like the verbal expressions idea where you write out the regex using a long form and that gets compiled into the actual regex, e.g:

const tester = VerEx()
    .startOfLine()
    .then('http')
    .maybe('s')
    .then('://')
    .maybe('www.')
    .anythingBut(' ')
    .endOfLine();

That seems like the best of both world approach to me.