Having now worked with terraform for 8 years, I could not agree more. Now, also because of having worked with terraform for 8 years and seeing how that's played out, I've heard and become tired of the whole "superset of json, transcribable to YAML, whitespace is not significant (which has never been a gripe of mine ever, not sure why every product cares so much about that)" promise of a silver bullet, and you very much face the same exact problems, just in different form. Terraform (HCL, to be specific) in particular can become fantastically ugly and verbose and "difficult to modify."

Configuration is difficult, the tooling is rarely the problem (at least in my experience).