The 'not using HCL' bit is really the only positive I've found so far because everything else has been more difficult than just using TF directly. I think my goals were slightly off from the beginning, because this is really just replacing one CLI with another for me at this point.

What I want: Use Terraform programmatically, i.e. call "cdktf deploy" or similar FROM node or python and give users some scripts they can use where I can abstract away some of the difficulties of learning to use Terraform natively for simple use cases (i.e. deploy an S3-based frontend host). Ideally, I had intended to distribute some npm-installable packages which would run this stuff.