I completely agree! I mistakenly ommitted the word 'can' from the quoted sentence. I just meant to offer another example of declarative configuration management

I completely agree! I mistakenly ommitted the word 'can' from the quoted sentence. I just meant to offer another example of declarative configuration management. The style of configuration/automation (of a config management tool) can be declarative whether the implementation has to consider the current state of the system or not.