I would agree with you, if HCL wasn't a bad language in itself:

* You can't make have variables in an import block (for example, to specify a different "id" value for each workspace)

* There is no explicit way to make a resource conditional based on variables. Only a hacky way to do that using "count = foo ? 1 : 0"

* You can't have variables in the backend configuration, making it impossible to store states in different places depending on the environment.

* You can't have variables in the "ignore_changes" field of a resource, making it impossible to dynamically ignore changes for a field (for example, based on module variables).

* The VSCode extension for HCL is slow and buggy. Using TS with pulumi or TFCDK makes it possible to use all the existing tooling of the language.