My experience with Pulumi is you can write bad pulumi code and good pulumi code and just like everything else, it's easy to end up in a codebase where one poor soul was tasked with writing it all and they didn't do the best job with it.

Please expand on your experiences, because I've had great luck with Pulumi at my company since October 2021. No engineer liked HCL, our demographic was engineers who were familiar with programming languages who wanted to self service basic infrastructure (AWS SecretsManager, IRSA roles, Databricks Service Principals, etc). We were pretty easily able to shim in a RunAtlantis inspired system that displayed previews that required explicit approval when a PR was raised, performed apply on merge to main, and ran drift checks periodically.

Why? I’ve had nothing but good experiences, but I don’t run it and the team that does is extremely competent

Strange, I have a lot of good things to say about both it and Terraform.

Probably some specifics might be more useful there...

My experience is that by stealing providers from Terraform, they failed to properly handle statically typed languages (Go) with certain providers (HCloud); I had problems with their ID type and had to abandon my Pulumi setup.

Have a look at https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ and tell me what you think. We don't have enough docs though. Tough being an open source thing that you want to keep open.

Running SST with Pulumi and it's been a great experience. Infrastructure and maintenance has been pleasant and SST's pre-fabs really make things easy to spin up resources.

please expand on this, I am interested (for real!)