Comment by Spivak

I think the lesson people need to start taking is that any form of declarative form of configuration will spawn an ad-hoc ecosystem to turn it imperative. The complexity of situations that can be expressed is by a configuration system is proportional to the complexity of that system. Simple and declarative is an oxymoron for anything but simple cases. Imperative systems can express arbitrary complexity and you will need it. It's why troposphere, terraform-cdk, pulumi, a billion templatating systems over k8s yaml files, and Ansible exist.