terraform was a great idea but the language makes devops folks have to do a lot of extra work, purely due to language design features. Terragrunt helps with a lot of that, but combined with the version churn, long-standing bugs, and more, I really wanted an alternative that was small, and simple.
Also: why isn't the state file created at command invocation by querying AWS for the state? Or at least have an option to generate the simplest TF for your current AWS state.
For the latter: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/terraformer