I’ve always thought terraform was kind of a perfect name, making large-scale changes to thousands of resources with a single command really does feel like terraforming.
It's just like the Genesis torpedo. You simply fire this torpedo from your starship at a (hopefully lifeless) planet or moon, and the Genesis Effect will re-form all the matter on the world, creating a world full of life, just the way you want it. You don't have to do any hard work like earth-moving, planting trees, etc., because the Genesis device does it all for you, quickly and automatically, according to your design.
terraform is the same: you just write a text file describing how you want a bunch of resources provisioned, run `terraform`, and it does all the work of provisioning those resources for you, quickly and automatically, according to your design. Honestly, I think it's a brilliant name.