A source of confusion by people the Gitter room is the interaction between the global aws-cdk binary and project-level dependencies. Systems like create-react-app or Next.js create builds that are entirely self-contained, requiring no global dependencies other than npm or yarn. This workflow is closer to most JS-based workflows today, and allows for the CDK a simple npm update/yarn update.

Additionally, a create-cdk-app package would (like create-react-app or many of its kind) can be used as a template in in yarn or npx can be used to run create-x-app, removing the need for a cdk init-like command for Node-based projects.