> The honest move is to admit you wanted code, then write code

This war will never end ... because there are genuine tradeoffs on both sides. YAML being a bad data description format isn't actually central to the question of whether you describe infra as data or as code. You can use JSON if you want. Data is static, 100% predicatable. Code is non-deterministic right up to the halting problem. If your infra should look different on wednesday to thursday, well it can do that! Some people like it, some people think it's the definition of hell.

Terraform makes an interesting tradeoff to try and have the best of both worlds but ultimately still falls on the same issue ... I've not seen one project yet of any complexity that didn't use workarounds to implement optional components (let's just pretend there's a list of them and it has 1 or zero elements in it!).

Ultimately I agree with your philosophy but maybe not your language. IMHO You really want a language that is built from the ground up around static typing and immutable constructs for this. Get as close to that predictable determinism as possible. But then, if the whole world knows python, I guess python it is.