Yeah, same experience. We had to write our own “terraform” like tooling to make use of it (retry loops and the like). It has (had? This was a couple years ago) no awareness, for example, of AWS, so out comes the SDK and Go.
“Why not just create templates with the SDK, constrain configurable fields with regex?”, I offered.
“CUE has typed feature structures!”, they said.
“FML.”, I thought.
It didn’t simplify configuration at all.
What simplifies configuration is all the people that know an existing tool and can be productive in it. As a late-comer CUE has none of that advantage.
Businesses want to solve business problems. Not meditate on one problem in perpetuity.
But it seemed to me that Cue wanted to be in charge: I could see how to import an existing JSON or YAML file, converting it to Cue and committing it to the repo, but I could not work out how to load JSON or YAML as input data at run time.
I hope this is easier now, but when I tried it seemed to lack some basic command-line affordances that would make it usable in place of Python or jq.