Pulimi on the other hand is closer to terraform, except you can write in a language which actually doesn't stand in your way and allows you to programmatically access values available during execution only. With CDK you can only reference them in CF template (lets say instance ID which you just created), but these are never "lifted" to your code. Also CDK misses native 'datasources' and offers limited mechanism for lookups.
Pulumi also has a killer Automatioin featre, where you can code infrastructure migrations, not unlike you'd do it for SQL. Neither TF nor CDK allows you to do that, and you'd need to code infrastructure state transitions in error prone bash wrappers.
As a developer, I quite liked Pulumi resource model, documentation and team responsiveness on Github and slack channel. I am working with CDK now, because of costs and I'd prefer Pulumi if there was a choice.