> Then again, as I said, I don't have much experience with Terraform so maybe I'm way off?
Yes. HCL is the easiest part of terraform.
State management / knowing what a particular tf apply is going to do and if it will put your stuff in an irreversible state where you have to go in and manually fix it is the hardest part. For us, we are forever struggling with IAM policies and KMS key aliases, especially if there is also a developer boundary coming into play as well.