It seems like cloudformation can replace a lot of this error handling stuff https://github.com/zenclabs/deploy/blob/master/src/service/a...
The reason CloudFormation isn't used is because it's a lot slower. It also has its own bugs, so it didn't seem like a big win: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46280080/cannot-delete-a...
See https://github.com/zenclabs/deploy/commit/72c1fc847661a0ed0d... for the old CloudFormation equivalent :) Happy to bring it back if there's demand for it!