I think the problems are mostly around configuration that is so complex and redundant that we need programmatic abstractions to deal with it—we need something l

I think the problems are mostly around configuration that is so complex and redundant that we need programmatic abstractions to deal with it—we need something like a general purpose programming language to DRY up and simplify that configuration, but the powers that be are clinging desperately to YAML (despite encoding a shitty, half-baked AST on top of it a la CloudFormation or “generating” YAML with text templates a la Helm) as the human/configuration interface presumably because the “it’s as easy as YAML!” is such a good marketing schtick. A certain amount of configuration complexity will always be there, but there’s still a lot of incidental complexity that could be cut away if we just generated these config a with a general purpose language.