Yes — that's basically what I was thinking: you could make an argument that using Kubernetes inherently adds an abstraction layer which might not be preferable to using platform-native components but it sounded like the person I was responding to was making the argument that using Terraform requires that approach.

I found that especially puzzling because one of the reasons why we switched to Terraform was because it let us take advantage of new AWS features on average much faster than CloudFormation.