[NeutralForest]

Agreed and they don't have good escape hatches. What was supposed to be declarative always ends up requiring some logic here and there and then you're stuck with a terrible language like YAML and you have to turn to templating, references to anchors and whatnot.

What I don't like is when you need to use a configuration language like Bicep or Terraform when the underlying architecture cannot be represented declaratively. You can create resources and provision them, that's fine. But any time you need forking paths, specific conditions, iterations over some resources, etc. You're done for, unless the configuration language has built a command or keyword for your specific use case. You can always tell me that I'm holding it wrong but when the platform requires me to use those config files or the SDKs for whatever languages are useless, it's infuriating.

Side note and not related to configuration languages but how they're used on $cloudProvider. But when you declare resources or operations that are legal in the language but invalid on the plateform, I die a little bit inside. The platform has all the knowledge about the existence of resources, policies, behavior; there's a whole class of problems that shouldn't exist before you're even trying to run a pipeline!