It sounds like you're describing the Cloudformation template visualiser/editor in the AWS Console, which I have never heard of anyone using as the primary interface for their Cloudformation templates.

Personally for simple projects I've had pretty good experiences writing a Yaml-based template directly, and for more complex projects I use Troposphere to generate Cloudformation template Yaml in Python.

CDK is a massive improvement over raw CloudFormation, and people are starting to move away from Terraform and to things like CDK or Pulumi.

This is a really funny thing, since for the last ~10 years I've been hearing how we're deliberately doing IaC/CM tools "not a programming languages because reasons" (and thus have to do horrible hacks to support trivial things like loops and conditions), and now suddenly we're building libraries in programming languages that convert the code into non-programming-language description, which is then interpreted by a program into several other intermediate representations and finally emits trivial API commands. I guess the next step would be write a declarative language on top of CDK or Pulumi that will compile it into python which will generate CF/TF files.

The magic is in knowing which trivial API commands to call to make the infrastructure match the desired state.

I manage a handful of projects with Terraform and it works well in many situations. It has improved a lot recently but for a long time I really hated the syntax. I still do to some extent but have learned to cope with it most of the time.

If you are working on a project where all of your infrastructure will live on AWS I would definitely urge you to give it a second look. The amount of infrastructure I manage right now with a single .yaml file is really killer.