Hiya! My team is also the team that writes and maintains the CDK construct you linked to.
I think it’s different approach - that’s all. Copilot
Is more focused around a full developer experience including setting up CI/CD, deployment environments and operational tooling like logs, stats, etc.
- It introduces an edit-test-debug cycle from hell, it doesn't do what you think from the mental model of a user-friendly CF template generator library (doesn't statically ensure stuff it emits actually works even superficially)
- It builds upon an already difficult and leaky abstraction (CloudFormation) so you just get additional failure modes and cognitive burden
- Glacially slow iteration, can easily take 10-30 mins to teardown/setup your app due to CloudFormation.
- fails to provide upsides from the costly tradeoff it makes to jump into turing complete programming languages, like 3rd party cdk components or iterating expressions at a repl
- don't even get me started on the npm dependency hell (you'll randomly be debugging mystic npm warnings already on the next day when installing a new submodule of cdk deps, when version mismatches appear), the other-languages-to-npm bridges, the "you can't use this without an IntelliSense style IDE" API design, buggy cli tools, etc
To summarize it doesn't manage complexity or give you a good abstraction. Probably because it tries to take on all of AWS functionality at once.
(Also the GP linked Fargate example is far from the functionality from the copilot example, like enabling you to actually dev and deploy the app - ecr, codebuild, codepipeline etc)
I think it’s different approach - that’s all. Copilot Is more focused around a full developer experience including setting up CI/CD, deployment environments and operational tooling like logs, stats, etc.