I'm pretty comfortable with JS and Typescript so I might be at an advantage that I don't perceive but CDK stuff doesn't require a good grasp of either language. If you are familiar with at least one other typed language you'll be fine. You'll spend more time digging through the Github issue tracker trying to figure which parts of AWS functionality are supported in the CDK and the assumptions the whole thing is built on.
This is true. Have guys new to JS/TS doing stuff in cdk quite a bit. Fortunately there's not much complexity to CDK's framework and if you stick to L1 constructs it's very very close to just writing the YAML (Minus minor casing conventions and other relatively trivial things)
