> General lang benefits from everyone understanding it and all the standard debug/test methods applying, which I'd much rather have than easier static analysis of the dynamic part.

Perhaps. I consider that a very narrow view that's detrimental on the long term.

> But they must've had a reason to try it.

They were obsessed with using a general-purpose language, and Python was the thing they knew.

> SREs weren't just arguing about which is better, they were asserting X is deprecated in favor of Y.

This is a kind of dishonesty I saw a lot at Google.

> TF has seemingly stuck outside. I'm still not a fan of that being a DSL, but at least it's one tons of people use and now Claude can easily handle.

Unfortunately Terraform still has significant flaws that prevent it from being used in a reliable fashion.