The difference is that AWS support can recover them and will help you. In that way it is a service not a tool. They are also the support team for the services that are being provisioned/managed so it is "one throat to choke".

On the contrary, I have seen many many destructive terraform applies that really messed everything up - without a helpful support team to call (unless you are paying Hashicorp) that can just get you out of the jam.

Yes it is a bit slower and often you need to wait for it to rollback when something goes wrong - but 9 times out of 10 that rollback succeeds. I'll take that trade-off...