I can't speak to the quality of CDK, which is 10x less popular by GitHub stars than base Terraform and is marked as experimental/bleeding edge and pre-1.0 by Ha

I can't speak to the quality of CDK, which is 10x less popular by GitHub stars than base Terraform and is marked as experimental/bleeding edge and pre-1.0 by Hashicorp's own documentation. If they're using a hacky workaround of some guy's software that definitely sounds like something that pre-1.0 software would do. I've found HCL perfectly adequate for vanilla Terraform, furthermore I've found no real reason to leverage CDK. To be clear I am not saying HCL is amazing, merely that it's adequate and better than YAML, and that I'm not sure how it could be considered confusing. I personally think HashiCorp has jumped the shark since the IBM acquisition and that CDK will never gain mass adoption in a significant way.