I agree that Hashi's approach to Terraform is “if there's a workaround, we won't fix it” I don't see Terraform as hard to use for DRY stuff, we have fully adopted Terraform, we now have 100+ modules that are used in more than 20+ AWS accounts with no major issues, these modules are opinionated and are mostly just plug and play for the teams that use them.

Pulumi is great, but you need to really trust your people to write stuff with Pulumi, in our case most teams can just grab a module, submit a pull-request with the values they want and it gets reviewed by a member of the infrastructure team, if everything looks ok then it's merged and the infra gets deployed/changed.

Even with that simple workflow we have issues with devs misunderstanding some concepts, even devs that have been using Terraform for months, it's not a simple tool to use, I would be worried about them having to use Pulumi for the same things.

It might just be an issue of scale though, we have a gigantic dev team and are riddled with regulations, so Terraform is the perfect fit for us, and again, we don't have DRYness issues, nothing obvious at least.