> I love TF but using something because it's popular is the worst reason ever. Why even include this as a reason? They don't really mean "because it's popular"

> I love TF but using something because it's popular is the worst reason ever. Why even include this as a reason? They don't really mean "because it's popular", they mean because it's the industry incumbent and de-facto standard. You can't use anything else, because nothing else makes sense. You need to standardize on one tool, especially if your infrastructure / teams grow. If you want to deploy something on AWS using an API with a minimal graph of dependencies, there's just Terraform. Pulumi isn't totally free, you have to write more code, there aren't nearly as many providers, not as many people know it, etc. There's basically nothing else. As a result, it's "popular".