People forget that the "rule of least power" is "the language with the least power suitable for the task". The question is whether YAML/HCL are suitable for the task to begin with. The following facts all testify that it is not, and that the principle of least power favors "real programming languages":
* CloudFormation hacks things like references, nested-stacks, macros, imports, etc onto YAML
* HCL becomes more powerful with each version
* Helm generates YAML with templates and recently added support for Lua
* AWS is building its CDK, which generates CloudFormation with programming languages
* CloudFormation hacks things like references, nested-stacks, macros, imports, etc onto YAML
* HCL becomes more powerful with each version
* Helm generates YAML with templates and recently added support for Lua
* AWS is building its CDK, which generates CloudFormation with programming languages
* Things like Terraform and Pulumi exist