It sounds like you're describing the Cloudformation template visualiser/editor in the AWS Console, which I have never heard of anyone using as the primary inter

It sounds like you're describing the Cloudformation template visualiser/editor in the AWS Console, which I have never heard of anyone using as the primary interface for their Cloudformation templates. Personally for simple projects I've had pretty good experiences writing a Yaml-based template directly, and for more complex projects I use Troposphere to generate Cloudformation template Yaml in Python.