I'm so tempted to do abandon CloudFormation for a Makefile with AWS cli commands.

If there wasn't a chip on my shoulder telling me I had to use what the next person would expect else as a contractor I risk being seen as unprofessional I'd do it in a heartbeat.

I've never used Terraform but CloudFormation just seems to suck, the documentation is poor and relatively few people are sharing their stack files. I've lost count of the number of times I've hit an error only to find Google hasn't heard of it.

IMO both of you guys should take a look at Pulumi. You could still use a makefile but using their TS clients to access the APIs is much more intuitive and easier to diagnose than shell scripts.

I can't see paying an ongoing monthly fee unless I was dealing with really big and ever changing architecture. Most of the time, I am writing everything into a log because I will want the ability to rebuild everything in the event something goes down.