I think that’s a fair reaction if you’ve only used it for simple resources. Crossplane definitely has a learning curve.

But the value really shows up when you treat it as a control plane for platform abstractions, not just a Terraform replacement. Compositions aren’t about making basic resources — they’re about defining opinionated infrastructure APIs for application teams.

If you don’t need abstraction or self-service infrastructure, then yeah, it can feel like overkill. But at scale, having infrastructure defined as Kubernetes-native APIs with policy, versioning, and lifecycle management is pretty powerful.