I don't see it that way. CDKs, Terraform, Pulumi all have their use cases and trade offs. I use a mix of them.

CDK is better when it works. Terraform has so many escape hatches it scales better with edge cases over time.

There are all sort of requirements that pops up, specially in times of downtime or testing infra migration in production etc. and it's much easier to manually edit the terraform states.

If you're any good at all at CDK, it's cdk8s is also a very solid clear & clean way to do kubernetes too. https://cdk8s.io/

I'm trying to make the decision for where to go with my home lab, and while Pulumi and Cue look neat, cdk8s seems so predictable & has such clear structure & form to it.

That's said the l1/l2/l3 distinction can be a brute to deal with. There's significant hidden complexity there.