[heydonovan]

I'll chime in. When I first used Terraform, it was described as this tool that would create resources in a cloud agnostic way. That's still possible, but not the main focal point.

Terraform just takes any API (called terraform providers) and applies the GitOps philosophy to it. That's it. Now you can easily recreate resources with a single command, modify whatever parameters you need, store those changes in Git, etc.

Yes, one long curl command would give you the same results but then you miss out on the concept of dependencies or API versioning or simple programming constructs like reading from a file or looping over values.