cdk bro

Terraform CDK is just a layer on top of terraform to avoid writing HCL/JSON.

It's also deprecated by Hashicorp now.

CDK on AWS itself uses CFN, which is a dog's breakfast and has no visibility on what's happening under the covers.

Just write HCL (or JSON, JSONNET etc) in the first place.

Not sure what's a dog breakfast, but why care about what's happening under the cover? You can't know what's happening anyway in AWS.

I thought that was deprecated?

cdktf is, not AWS CDK. The former allows you to use Terraform without HCL, the latter is a generator for CloudFormation.

Am I the only person that despises CDK? Why would I use a cloud specific language instead of something like opentofu?

CDK's twin problems are that it compiles down to CloudFormation and that AWS did a terrible job at supporting languages other than TypeScript. The latter is theoretically fixable with a native FFI library that is called from each language, but the former is too leaky of an abstraction.

I've only ever used it with ts and thought the experience was pretty good (especially compared to terraform)

Considering all the downvotes I got I guess you're not the only one. I'm surprised because I really like cdk. It makes creating an AWS stack really easy, and for having dealt with terraform configurations that were trying to deal with multiple cloud platforms I'd rather have a per-platform eDSL