I mean, I agree in that I'd like such a tool too, but given that we don't have this hypothetical more-scalable kubernetes, how is it such an unimaginably shitty

I mean, I agree in that I'd like such a tool too, but given that we don't have this hypothetical more-scalable kubernetes, how is it such an unimaginably shitty idea to build tooling for declarative configuration of clusters? As you say, there's still a fundamental amount of complexity involved in operating a system, and the best abstractions limit the amount you need to care about in a given context. Something I like about declarative configuration specifically is how well it helps you move information from ephemeral human memories and habits into something more-reliable. Most places I've worked usually had some weird ephemeral things, oral history about what needs to be treated differently, many systems that needed conversations to understand, etc. The more you limit your use of global mutable state (interactively changing things in production), the less room there is for important stuff to live in people's heads. When I can spin up on a new service just by learning how a tool works and reading their configs, then I have all of the "what" and "how" and "where" there to look up at any time in a consistent way. There's much less room for weird state or needing to do rituals or broken staircases or whatever. When I talk with people, I can focus much more on the "why" questions. I might be more sensitive to this than some people, because I've got a shitty memory, but the more I'm able to just check a thing the better. Theoretically documentation can fill a lot of the same role, but I've never worked anywhere with consistently up-to-date and comprehensive documentation for what's deployed. When it's the only way to deploy at all, it's no longer optional. It feels like the same sort of thing as a good static type system to me. You can do local reasoning with just what you see, and limit unexpected action at a distance. The types are mandatory, and machine-checked, so you can't get them wrong in certain ways, and you can't just skip writing them like you do sometimes for unit tests that would cover similar verification otherwise.