> Is that an easy mistake to make and a hard one to recover from, in your experience?

If you're alone in a codebase? Probably not.

In a company with many contributors of varying degrees of competence (from your new grad to your incompetent senior staff), yes.

In large repositories, without extremely diligent reviewers, it's impossible to prevent developers from creating the most convoluted anti-patterny spaghetti code, that will get copy/pasted ad nauseam across your codebase.

Terraform as a tool and HCL as a programming language leave a lot to be desire (in hindsight only, because, let's be honest, it's been a boon for automation), but their constrained nature makes it easier to reign in the zealous junior developer who just discovered OOP and insists on trying it everywhere...