> It seems to me that infra management is inherently suited to declarative logic. I'm pragmatic enough to understand why SWEs with little infra experience might prefer an imperative approach, but I tend to think you should pick one or the other and stick to it.

Yep. IMO, imperative is definitely easier to reason about, and it’s what most programming languages are designed around, but it is absolutely the wrong approach for infrastructure. There are too many things that can go wrong that you may or may not have designed for. Declarative _is_ the state.