I've been using Pulumi for a few weeks now and it works pretty much exactly as advertised (for AWS at least). I am yet to run into any major hurdles and for any minor issues I have had the Pulumi team have been very responsive (they have a public Slack channel available).

It actually uses terraform's API's under the hood which is comforting in a way because you know it's building on a solid foundation.

I would not go back to writing HCL after experiencing Pulumi if I can avoid it, using a "real" programming language just feels a whole lot more natural and allows for much more powerful abstractions.