I think this discussion is going on circles because you are both discussing different parts of the problem as if they are the same part. A system could be said

I think this discussion is going on circles because you are both discussing different parts of the problem as if they are the same part. A system could be said to have a declarative execution model if its input is a description of a desired result and that system then decides for itself what sequence of side-effects to perform to achieve that result. Terraform, CloudFormation, and Pulumi are all declarative by this definition. However, there's also the question of how you tell the system how to build that data structure in the first place. CloudFormation and Terraform both do so with some form of DSL, with the effect that the source program perhaps more directly corresponds with the data structure it produces. Pulumi instead uses general-purpose languages to generate the data structure, and so the source code that produces it can, if desired, bare very little direct resemblance to the resulting data structure. The tradeoff here then seems to be more about how far removed the input shape is from the resulting declarative data structure, rather than about "declarative or not". Some folks prefer the input to more directly match the underlying model, while others prefer to intentionally abstract away those details behind a higher level API. I don't think either is right or wrong... I actually wish these two approaches were complementary inside the same product rather than two companies trying to kick each other in the shins, but that's capitalism for you, I guess.