You might want to give cfn-builder[0] a try. I'm biased because I wrote it but I find that it's a good way to write and maintain my CFN templates. Also it's written in simple Nodejs and is easy to expand for your own needs.
CloudFormation isn't really good enough because it's AWS specific and doesn't track changes to the state. Plus it just uses data serialisation formats as well so doesn't even address the core problems I raised with HCL. What I really want is Puppet for Infrastructure; the closest I've used to that is Terraform but the syntax isn't quite there...yet.
Plus the pace of development in nodejs worries me. All too often I've ran into issues where modules have changed and broken things downstream. When you're running infrastructure as code you really want to be damn sure your tooling is going to be consistent for years to come and I really don't have that faith in nodejs. Sure, if your a JavaScript developer you can manage it easily enough, but if you're DevOps who rarely touches JS then you really want your tools to be low maintenance. So to that end I wouldn't consider any nodejs projects for any serious production work given the kind of customers I work for (high availability stuff for some major brands). I might be fine but it's just not worth the risk.
[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/cfn-builder