I do agree CDKTF is an improvement over HCL, but aren't you bothered by being blocked by terraform itself? You have to resort to intrinsics [1].
This is why I dropped CDK for TF in favor of Pulumi, although I do feel Terraform has more maturity and polish but not enough to warrant its limitations.
Once in a while, I forget to use Fn when I should.
But I'll take that annoyance anyday over the absolute pain of HCL.
I haven't tried Pulumi, I will eventually. (Cloud services have TF providers more often than Pulumi ones. But if Pulumi is easy to extend, maybe doesn't matter.)
I suspect Pulumi is easy to extend because most of the API is basically a state-preserving, idempotent wrapper around existing APIs. When I was messing with it on GCP, their API almost always used the exact same objects the GCP API accepted. I could actually use the GCP docs to create the objects (there are big upsides and downsides to this).
