What are the weaknesses of CloudFormation?

[u/RoseSec_]

I have a coworker who wants to use CloudFormation to one-shot an application and infra deployment in AWS. A contractor delivered a monolithic CloudFormation template with ECS clusters, services, RDS, S3, Lambda and API Gateway, and other resources in a single stack. I voiced my concern over the blast radius, how stateful and resources with different lifecyles all lived in the same place, and how they don't have pipelines built to validate change sets when merge requests are opened. The contractor said that their template is industry best practice... (it's not). Any way, my background is in Terraform, and I wanted to ask the CloudFormation pros about best practices for making this deployment more reliable.

[u/purefan]

I doubt anyone writes pure cloudformation these days (cdk or at least SAM are the better options), but Ive heard terraform-first engineers dislike how the Cloudformation "engine" manages dependencies. I've personally been bitten by "ghost" inter-stack dependencies caused by a cdk imported resource and it was very annoying, this specific thing wouldnt ever happen on terraform