I have a sinking feeling that the whole business of writing huge config files (semi-)manually (templating, #include, and YAML-references that reference things f

I have a sinking feeling that the whole business of writing huge config files (semi-)manually (templating, #include, and YAML-references that reference things from god knows where) is... too low-level? Too imperative? It feels like if one was manually laying out the vtables and the unwinding info in assembly language: sure, the macros will go a long way helping you, but maybe the better way would be to have an actual high-level declarative description that would get translated down to metal. And "high-level" doesn't mean, let's use an analogy, M4, it means Gradle.