Although your headline is correct imho, I think there are lots of things that the orchestrator might need to do above this, especially if you want the tool to b

Although your headline is correct imho, I think there are lots of things that the orchestrator might need to do above this, especially if you want the tool to be cloud agnostic so that everyone can use it, which just makes things a little more complicated. You might want to add something to the existing system, like another web server. These tools have to "add item and wire it up to load balancer". You might want to scale up. This might work natively or it might require creating new larger instances and then getting rid of the old ones. You might want to update the images to newer versions. You might need more public IPs. You might be adding something to an existing larger network so you need to reference existing objects. You might need to "create if not exists" etc. I think your argument covers the intiial use-case in most places but any system used over time will need the other stuff done to it, hence the "complexity" of the tools. tbf, I don't think Terraform is that complex in itself, I think because it is in config files, it can be more complex to understand and work with.