And it always will be, cdktf is the same but on Terraform objects. At some point you have to reach the end and spit out the final list of stuff you want.

If you want full imperative just use the AWS sdk or Ansible but I think people have realized how not maintainable that pattern is.

Sure, like C is just a veneer on top of machine language.

Every time I need to do something in CDK I am reminded of https://xkcd.com/2347/ except the whole thing is my config and the tiny bit is the thing I want to understand how to change.

CFN is also a bunch of abstraction over api calls. You can set up infrastructure using boto3 if you want, for free.