[turtles3]

I think the root of the issue is not that we need imperative languages for configuring cluster workloads - declarative state as an API contract between clients of the cluster and the cluster itself is a good thing. The reconciliation model is what makes kubernetes work, and that should be preserved.

But I do think we need better tools to generate said declarative state, regardless of its serialization format (yaml, JSON or other). Hand editing the raw declarative state is clearly untenable, hence the development of the various templating solutions. But I don't see an issue with using an imperative program to generate the declarative state either, as long as the declarative state is what forms the substance of the API to the cluster.