[spion]

The frontend ecosystem realized (at the time of React) that the (template) DSL isn't really the point. Its the declarative description of what the end result should look like (as well as applying the diff) which is the important bit, not how you generate that declarative description. The devops space is slowly moving in this direction too.

TypeScript is a great fit to model the unwieldy yaml / json schemas with precision, getting less in the way compared to most languages with sum types. Deno could be a great player in this space that avoids the complexity of npm, especially with its sandbox to restrict side-effects, networking and external commands.

CDKs come with their own multi-language compiler (jsii-rosetta) which results with a ~300MB npm install. Even when all you wanted was to use simple typescript functions to output some JSON and/or yaml.