I’m back to managing AWS infra so looked into the state of terraform and opentofu. From looking at the repos and viewing the issues it seems that most of the activity is on the opentofu side in terms of features. It also seems more responsive to community issues.
Even with opentofu, there’s still the old terraform issue - lots of releases. So in looking into it more, I found there are solutions to this: tfenv and tofuenv. Both of these download and select various versions of the tools. Combined with direnv, it’s really simple to use.
Using them in a CI context is a further exercise, but this project doesn’t need that level of automation yet.