Road to Declarative Systems

Over the past few years I have worked at different companies building data lakehouses/meshes, and one challenge that has been constant is the need to understand the state of things (cloud, platform, pipeline, computers, etc) and how to document and mutate the state of these in a straightforward manner. Why declarative systems? Lets say you were tasked with ensuring that all cloud storage is configured in a manner which matches the new standards put in place by the security team....