It's important to note that Terraform doesn't compile down to CloudFormation stacks like CDK does. Terraform providers instead call AWS APIs directly. This should allow Terraform much more composability than CDK for the very points you've listed unfortunately Terraform does still compile down to a fucking JSON state -- which is easily my biggest complaint about Terraform.

My issue with anything that ultimately compiles to a JSON or YAML state/config is that you lose the dependency tree (or your dependency tree becomes rigidly defined by the way the transpiler converts your code into JSON). It causes so many problems on any large project that ultimately the only solution is to break the project up into smaller distinct projects within the same git repository. Which is basically the same solution to working with JSON/YAML CF stacks directly.

If someone can create a language (or SDK for $PROGRAMMING_LANG) that then worked with AWS APIs directly, (like Terraform), didn't just transpile back to JSON, and isn't as verbose as using boto3 directly -- well I think that product might stand a real chance of displacing Terraform.

I've got a lot of strong thoughts on how this could be done right so I did consider having an attempt at it myself using the shell scripting language I'd designed as a rough foundation. But having a full time job already, two young kids, and a growing in popularity open source project (namely my aforementioned $SHELL), I realised any Terraform competitor I did create would be doomed to either never being maintained, or the project would literally burn me out.