I'm so tempted to do abandon CloudFormation for a Makefile with AWS cli commands.

If there wasn't a chip on my shoulder telling me I had to use what the next person would expect else as a contractor I risk being seen as unprofessional I'd do it in a heartbeat.

I've never used Terraform but CloudFormation just seems to suck, the documentation is poor and relatively few people are sharing their stack files. I've lost count of the number of times I've hit an error only to find Google hasn't heard of it.