So much vendor lock-in, so much dependance on internet connectivity, so many buzzwords around... so much magic (as the post's title describes). I really dislike having to deal with a lot of third-party magic when doing programming.
Serverless Stack framework is not bread and butter as they describe it, it often locks up and CPU going to 100% on my machine, misses debug breakpoints, breaks with weird error messages pointing to compiled JS code that are hard to trace back to TypeScript, etc, etc. And you are right, you are locked in, there is too much magic, you are dependent on internet connection.
Maybe I just inherited shitty serverless project, but it is painful.
That said though, we often work with teams in our Slack to get their setup working well. If you haven't, I'd recommend popping in and posting about it. Or just send me an email: jay@serverless-stack.com and we'll figure it out.
I'm currently working on using Terraform in Az DevOps Pipelines and Releases, to stand up an instance of something that has multiple 'cloud object' requirements. The Release process is frustrating, because the default assumptions made by Azure's tooling want me to format my variables a certain way. But, it would probably be like 'magic' if I just caved in and reworked our variables to be more Azure-friendly naming style.
Why should the tool have influence over the product? I know it's taking me more time to get it to work 'my' way, but I feel like I should force the system to adapt to my needs, instead of the other way around.