We have a moderately complex set of services we deploy with some separation of application code and infrastructure. No application code that runs on VMs is deployed as part of the infrastructure IaC - that’s all loaded once the “empty” infra is in place. The grey area is around non-VM compute like Lambda and Step Functions, which can be a part of the infra templates.

The way these services work requires an initial set of code to create the resources, and while it would be possible to send a “no-op” payload for the infrastructure deployment and then update it with real application code later, that seems pedantic (to us).

Maybe someday that changes, but for now it isn’t at all burdensome and we’ve been very successful with this approach.