That's not even really true. Hacker News readers seem to fixate heavily on the most popular desktop versions of Linux distros, but that is far from all they mak

That's not even really true. Hacker News readers seem to fixate heavily on the most popular desktop versions of Linux distros, but that is far from all they make. SUSE with SLE Micro and Edge Image Builder is a declarative build system for creating your own installer images. If you don't want SLE Micro, they even give you the Elemental Toolkit, which can be used to build your own custom distro in a declarative manner. I don't know much about Debian and Red Hat's approaches to this, but I know they have similar tooling. The "problem," if you want to call it that, is developers, if I may be uncharitable for a brief moment here, are amazingly solipsistic. The major Linux vendors are targeting enterprise edge computing use cases, whereas developers only ever think about the endpoint PCs they themselves use for development. Plenty of distro tooling will give you declaratively built, transactionally updated, immutable server images, but if they don't give you the same for your personal laptop, those efforts are invisible to the modal Hacker News commenter. For what it's worth, there's also Guix, which is literally a clone of Nix but part of the GNU project, so it only uses free software and opts for Guile instead of a custom DSL for configuration. It wasn't a pre-existing distro that changed, of course.