Agreed, I swapped my team from teraform to Ansible to SAM... SAM has been the most reliable and resilient and stable for my use cases (general serverless)
It's at least second or third worst. Worst would be writing your own deployment tool that does what CloudFormation (or TF or Pulumi) do. Second worst would be writing a tool that uses a templating language to generate CloudFormation and only using that.