The problem here is that while you can say “Terraform is more than a DSL” - if you ever back the layers or try have a conversation with someone who’s a true dyed in the wool Terraform zealot and start to try and understand where they’re coming from, you begin to realise they don’t love Terraform, they love this weird half language because they’re an expert in it, and they’ve built their entire career on being an expert on something you can only use for one specific use case.
That's from the article, and that really sounds a lot like talking to someone that knows and loved regular expressions (and I count myself as one of those people). The alternative, which is often done in lower level languages, is either some simple nested conditionals or a state machine, and plenty of people choose to just write state machines. I mean, that's all a regular expression is anyway, a shorthand expression for building state machines to process strings.
It should be no surprise that there are plenty of people that think regular expressions are wasteful and you should just write your own state machine (fewer than there were in the past, but they exist). Regular expressions are exactly like everything else that's being discusses in the article, but many people like them. Perhaps that's a point we should focus on to determine what makes a DSL successful and good compared to the alternative.
