It does sit at the same level as helm & timoni. It just takes a code-based approach to managing your cluster (which in turn can manage your infra but that wasn't the larger point).
They clearly did not. Their example of something that's supposedly not possible in Terraform:
"If you really do think that Terraform is code, then go try and make multiple DNS records for each random instance ID based on a dynamic number of instances. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you can do that in Terraform."
Is something a junior infrastructure engineer can do in about a dozen lines of Terraform code: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/if-you-really-do-think-that... (Taken from another comment here)
If they would have asked anyone that uses Terraform, they would not have written that.
This is exactly the approach that Terraform takes. Both Terraform and its providers are written in Go, which is a great language for this purpose because of GoReleaser and the ease of compiling to different architectures and OSes. It scales just fine.
Did the author talk to any senior Terraform practicioners before building this?