According to their docs, SST uses Pulumi under the hood [1]

It's supposed to be a bit easier for developers to pick up, but you should be able to achieve the same thing with Pulumi AFAIU

[1]: https://sst.dev/docs/#faq

Does Pulumi still use Terraform under the hood?

Does Terraform still use computers under the hood?

does computers still use electric sand under the hood?

I think some providers are native pulumi now, some still use terraform providers

As far as I know it doesn't, although there are some "bridge" providers that do.

that's creating the raw ecs cluster

these components have

1. adding services that can auto scale

2. specifying load balancing config

3. automatic service discovery registration

4. network tunnel to access vpc resources from your machine

5. typesafe resource linking to access your resources in your application code

6. dev mode which brings up your system locally in a single multiplexed terminal UI

not pitching - just listing out why we bother doing anything. pulumi is great and if you want a more low level experience you should use it

I understand, that is indeed valuable. But not at all clear from the documentation / copy in the linked post. I did not watch the video...

Yeah it's something we need to get better at.

sometimes abstractions add value. one could say the same sort of thing about Tailscale for example - why not just use Wireguard? but the abstraction adds value imo