I'm frankly really confused that Terraform is still so widely used for AWS IaC when CDK exists.

CDK still uses cloudformation under the hood right? Anything to do with CF gets a hard pass from me.

Credit where credit is due CF is better than it used to be. Of course just like TF doesn't rollback CF will rollback and on an initial deploy you get in this weird state where you have to completely remove your stack to try again.

But it was significantly faster than it used to be. I never want to use it tho.

They actually released support for retrying failed stack updates the other week: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-cloudformation-...

Well, that’s only 5 years too late to make me consider it :P

The situation where anything goes wrong, and you just sit there staring at CF being unable to delete some S3 bucket for hours, eventually going into the console manually and deleting it in one second. Has left me really sour on the whole thing.

One reason is because TF supports many clouds and people like having skills that are not vendor specific

Half true. The true half is that terraform will work out of the box with basically all clouds and many saas vendors. The untrue half is that terraform does nothing to abstract away the underlying vendor. You cant treat gcp VMs the same as aws EC2 instances. You do get to reuse HCL.

true, but the tooling and workflow remains the same.

Not sure of any tool that could abstract the details sufficiently to be widely adopted. There is just too much nuance in cloud config.

I'm exploring using CUE (https://cuelang.org) to define TF resources, exporting as JSON for TF. So far it's much nicer