I was just saying HCL didn't invent block config. Perhaps nginx, Caddy, Lisp, F#'s Computation Expressions all primed me for HCL style syntax so it looks pretty clear to me. The key is understanding the value of that "repeating the key name", because it doesn't just become a keyname, it becomes a constructor and makes the syntax much simpler.

At the end of the day HCL isn't that much more complex than something like yaml. Saying "You don't want your developers learning yaml" is like saying "You don't want your developers learning Yaml. They send an email to the SRE guys, and the SRE guys are the Yaml experts"