There’s a huge ecosystem of tools and cloud products that augment terraform. Refer to the list of OpenTF supporters:

https://opentf.org/#output

"better" is very subjective, but kubernetes is the most popular choice

Some managed k8s from a cloud provider, which is fairly close to cloud agnostic compute outside of persistent volumes.

The HN trope is "you don't need k8s," but k8s manifests have a lot of mindshare behind them. I'd rather use a managed k8s versus manage my own Nomad pool. Sure, managed k8s is complex for cloud providers, but I can mostly offload that complexity provided I'm not full microservices inside the cluster.

I’ve yet to find anything that fills the void of running containers, VMs, and whatever else you want to add a “driver” for, in such a simple distribution. You can run nomad on one slow host or 30 monsters. Works great for teams who can’t use the cloud.

Nomad has taken the same niche that home-lab Docker clusters had. Docker Swarms ease of use is an advantage over Kubernetes for small setups, but its filled with bugs and basically unsupported. Nomad is a viable replacement for that setup.