echo many of the pain points, especially the licensing drama part.

however, it's not practical to say retire now without a clear way out. at this point, most companies are heavily invested in terraform with tens of thousands of lines of IAC source code written in terraform HCL.

what would be the effort level if all of these need to be re-written with 100% parity and a 0-downtime migration?

I think terraform is too big to die as of right now. would love to know if there are new tools that solves all the pain points and can convert existing terraform investment into something with low effort and risk