I'm currently in the middle of converting my team to straight CF instead of CDK/Terraform/Serverless. To me it's needlessly complicated, CF is simple, configurable, importantly it's _declarative_, which is the 'correct' way to approach infra (imho, of course).

Deploying it? `aws cloudformation package -> aws cloudformation deploy`. That's it. No need for third party tooling or other madness.

I think the lack of understanding the fundamentals leads people to picking up tools that abstract the fundamentals away (but then leads to more complex solutions).