I really despise the node dependency of CDK as well. I really don’t want to have anything to do with the node ecosystem. If the CDK was a stand alone binary like the aws cli I would be much happier.

I’m not as experienced as you, but we have been using CDK for a lambda only system and it has been working well for us. CDK does have some warts, for example you can’t update multiple global secondarily indexes on a dynamodb table despite cloudformation having the capability.

I think the big advantage of the CDK is that it is more approachable for software engineers who do not have a lot of infrastructure experience. We currently are a dev team who also manage our infra and we do not have dedicated infra staff or devops/sre staff. Writing python code in a declarative style is easier for us devs instead of diving into terraformation.