not OP, but I use terraform instead.
What, it's Terraform's fault that you haven't bothered to write one yourself?
What it does have is modules, which accomplish the same. And of course, if you don't want to write them then just as with L2/L3 constructs you are limited to using others'.
Let's just all code in assembly then? Because we all should bother to write anything and everything from scratch?
And it is also possible to write in assembly, will you?
> The complaint was that they had to use a third party or community one
And isn't that fair? People want support? Official support? Is that wrong? And yes community modules especially since they might not be from the same group lack consistency, documentation and often doesn't get updated as regularly. The magic is the vendor is the only 1 that can properly coordinate updates.
> as though those people are doing by some kind of magic unavailable to them
Then why are you using Terraform? The APIs behind Terraform are also available to you so you can use that directly. There's no magic unavailable to you either. And you go beyond not using those APIs and build your own servers and data centers too.
I don't get why Terraform is a fair abstraction you're defending yet you're arguing against people wanting a higher level of abstraction.
Modules are the same abstraction as L2/L3 constructs. In either case if you don't want to use someone else's (and you want one) you write your own. If you then haven't, it's not Terraform's or AWS CDK's fault.
I've always found that Terraform does it exceptionally well, mostly because of the dependency graph and how good providers map resources so that they don't end up in a dead lock.