> as soon as you need to something higher (usually some sort of looping over a complex data structure and populating fields from those values) it gets real painful

I'd argue this is one such guardrail. Way more than once I've seen infrastructure resources exhausted (frequently cloud provider limits), because a hard line wasn't maintained between infrastructure code and application code. Frequently in the form of "It just makes sense for us to create one %s infrastructure resource for each %s in our application!" followed by a series of midnight conference calls weeks-months later.