I think the article dances around the real issue when it comes to the declarative vs imperative debate. The discussion should always take into consideration the

I think the article dances around the real issue when it comes to the declarative vs imperative debate. The discussion should always take into consideration the complexity of the system, and its dynamic nature. Systems tend to grow in complexity over time and the declarative constructs that were once enough to describe the state of the system start to require ever increasing complex hacks that resemble imperative code. At that moment the declarative interface for the system should be redesigned, with the new complexity moving into the imperative core, once again making the declarative interface/shell be congruent and simple. This process will probably never end, as we build more and more complex systems we will find new abstractions that better fit at modeling the state of the systems, and we have to go through that process of redefining the declarative models on an ongoing basis. If you look at the Kubernetes world, the same pattern played out. You have a declarative layer that is becoming ever more complex and hard to manage using tools like Helm, but then there is also a trend of encoding imperative operational knowledge in new frameworks and operators, that expose a much simpler PaaS declarative layer to users.