If I had experienced what you just described, I would probably have the same opinion - but after the initial learning curve, I haven't really had any of the pro

If I had experienced what you just described, I would probably have the same opinion - but after the initial learning curve, I haven't really had any of the problems you've listed. The only times I've had to go manually modify cloud resources to fix something was always because I was doing it wrong in the first place. On the other hand, CloudFormation is not perfect either. The rollback does not work 100% of the time and I've had it roll back a set of templates that took 45 minutes to deploy because there was some inconsequential timeout that could have been ignored. I've also had pre-built templates developed by AWS outright fail, which is strange considering AWS themselves built it. Use what works best for you and your team.