It makes sense, and the biggest ways to understand are to do what you're talking about and try and "do it better." As other commenters pointed out, as you make

It makes sense, and the biggest ways to understand are to do what you're talking about and try and "do it better." As other commenters pointed out, as you make the bash script more and more complicated, you'll see why terraform is the way it is. You may even find ways to do it better, and then you can make your own project/competitor, or submit a change back to the open source project. However, in the mean time, it's always worth coming at these things with the generosity of mind to assume that smart people made tradeoffs for real reasons, and for your "day job" work in the frameworks adopted until you understand the problemspace well enough to give truly informed feedback on why to do something differently.