What about the non-determinism, lack of sand-boxing and Turing-completeness of a real programming language?

What about the lack of a mature language server for code completion and at-your-fingertips documentation? What about the lack of mature tooling for static analysis, linting, code formatting, etc?

What about the poor support for defaults and partial overrides on object-type (read: namespaced without redundant_underscore_thing_*) configuration directives?

What about the very limited module capabilities?

What about the limited set of deterministic functions available (e.g. you get base64, yaml, csv, and otherwise GLHF)?

There's no reason the code can't be sandboxed, Turing-completeness is a feature not a bug (nor is undecidability a real problem), and non-deterministic behavior where it's undesirable is just a potential hazard in the real world. No system can avoid it unless that system never interacts with the outside world.

Because those aren't real-world concerns???

HCL is its own language so Hashicorp can "own" the experience, tie you into an Enterprise toolchain, and scratch their "I've always wanted to build a language!" itch

But it works and ops people love it because most ops people in industry today cannot even write a simple Python script. So...tools like Pulumi are actually out of their reach.

Pulumi is deterministic.