I haven't done a lot of infrastructure work in the past few years so haven't stayed super on top of the latest changes. I last used it heavily in the earlier days, roughly 4-7 years ago now. And while a lot of the community was great, put in a lot of work on the product, and generally wanted to improve the tool, there were also a lot of very vocal stodgy old timers that were really resistant to any improvements from the very earliest days. It definitely rubbed me the wrong way at times and made me want to look at alternatives.

I remember some old threads about loops for instance, and a lot of the core community was fully convinced that it was a terrible idea, nobody should ever need loops, and if you're a complete weirdo who does want them you should just use a separate templating language to generate your terraform configs instead. And when modules were first released, the support for using them as a means of local code encapsulation and reuse was pretty weak (it would for some reason hard-code absolute file paths in the tfstate file IIRC, so if one person ran a terraform plan on a state file somebody else had last pushed it would always show up as needing to be changed even if it was already up to date). Again I remember core developers insisting that nobody needs features for local code reuse, and modules are only needed for publishing public resources that others can pull in.

Anyway, by no means do I hate Terraform, but I definitely associate it with being unnecessarily clunky and convoluted and full of gotchas even for fairly common use cases. In my opinion that reputation is pretty deserved and built up over probably a hundred hours of experience struggling with it a few years ago. I'm glad to hear that it sounds like that is changing, but I'd still be very cautious and carefully evaluate all the newer alternatives before rushing back to use it again.