I work with CloudFormation scripts extremely often in my line of work and while confusing at first they're extremely clean once you wrap your head around them. Like any tool or language there are multiple ways to approach issues, your solution can be clean and efficient or "a ream of dirty hacks", it really depends on how familiar you are with the tools.

CDK itself relies on a good number of hacks and workarounds, some of which are not well-vetted at all in my experience. Some of the workarounds are really a symptom in my opinion of certain resources not being part of CloudFormation itself, when if they were, it feels like it’d be almost entirely a non-issue.

It’s a little odd that at this point in the game, the prospect of “make a thing that depends on another thing” is still not an entirely solved problem within AWS.