I've been pretty happy with HCL when using Terraform (or Tofu), especially considering there is pretty much no declarative language with a comparably sized ecos

I've been pretty happy with HCL when using Terraform (or Tofu), especially considering there is pretty much no declarative language with a comparably sized ecosystem to match it against. Most tools and languages that advertise themselves as being a replacement (either for HCL, or Terraform wholesale) are pretty bad in various ways, have no traction (for whatever reason) or lack actual real world usage. One of the biggest things people seem to skip over is the way in which non-software-developers can actually still use it if they come from a sysadmin background. In a way, HCL protects them from falling into the imperative language trap and having to learn software development before being able to do any IaC at all. It's not realistic, and it doesn't work with the people that are already in the field, at scale. Some tools like SaltStack try to do both, but you end up in the same place where Ansible lives: hiding your declarations in template languages or extensions in imperative languages, at which point you might as well skip the IaC interface and go straight to python or something like that.