You're correct, but, when approaching this from the human perspective, it's less about the technology and the reality and more about "do I have a record of the

You're correct, but, when approaching this from the human perspective, it's less about the technology and the reality and more about "do I have a record of the last state I asked the cluster to be in before I fucked it up?". Ultimately that's what matters. Auditability is great, but in practice, when the shit hits the fan, can I get the application that brings in our company's money, and our customers rely on to breath, back to the state it was after 5 years and 73 updates? Updating the manifests, pushing them to version control and having CD deploy them encourages humans to "do the right thing". It would be quite easy though to just tweak that one environment variable though while I patch in the new image version to update that one service; until the entire cluster dies and I can't retrieve the last definition and need an equivalent cluster up within the hour. This is really more about the practice of writing down the state you want the cluster to be in (the spec) and showing it to the cluster, than just ordering it to do one thing without context. In this sense, Declarative Vs Imperative is just a proxy term for "do I have a record of the state I asked the cluster to keep?"