I enjoy writing near-pristine CloudFormation. My only tweak is that I write "literate" templates in Markdown using ```yaml blocks, then strip everything else out before executing them.

I (re)use a lot of templates as "products", e.g. I have an RDS PostgreSQL template that I've been maintaining and using for years.

CloudFormation modules are great for encapsulation and reuse if you actually have anything you want to reuse at sub-template granularity. I rarely do. For example, we have a bunch of API services that all work the same way. In that case, the granularity of reuse is the template. I don't have a bunch of different services/products that all need to reuse a given resource in the same way.

For the same reason, I'm not very excited by CDK and other CloudFormation-producing tools.

I started mucking around with Terraform, but immediately discovered I needed to create a provider (custom resource). That's an incredibly manual process to begin with, but almost all of it is translating between Terraform representation (structures based on HCL2) and the JSON representation of whatever API you're using. So much translation when 99.999% of the APIs you'll use will be JSON. Aaaaaarrrrghhhh.

Sorry.