All of this IAC crap was sold to barely-tech-literate engineering managers as “declarative makes the complexity go away!” so every IAC vendor wed themselves to YAML or HCL or JSON, but of course the complexity doesn’t go away and so the vendors came up with increasingly absurd ways to DRY up this YAML (text templates a la Helm or encoding a DSL into your config language a la Terraform and CloudFormation). Eventually people realized this was madness and what’s really needed is a programming language that can resolve to these static manifests, so these vendors in their zeal to forever misunderstand the assignment came out with CDKs so we can compile source code to YAML with a whole bunch of pointless inheritance to really make a mess of things.