While this is true, the reason is not called out: CDK simply generates a CloudFormation Template, and thus uses CloudFormation for state management, rather than using the cloud APIs directly.
I never have to worry about losing the state or ending with the incomplete state, and no matter what, I can always just delete the whole CF stack (in rare cases, you might have to retry deletion, but it never loses resources.)
That said, I don’t think that “generates CloudFormation JSON” is a bad attribute of CDK, but it is a major difference between Pulumi and CDK. In particular it means arbitrary values cannot be used for control flow at run time with CDK, since the template has a static generation step. However, it also does not require an additional tool at runtime, which has value in some cases.
This is noteworthy because many times CDK's constraints match CloudFormation's constraints. I've noticed a few issues in the CDK github repo that a feature is incomplete because they are waiting for a change or feature to land in CloudFormation first.