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.