Great little writeup ! After mangling YAML, HCL, JSON for years as an ops engineer, I have come to the same realisation. In fact, I have put this into practice in production pipelines by using: jkcfg[1] for the last couple of years. Two data points: 1. Zero developer support contract rate around YAML syntax and templating issues 2. High number of contributions in our private typescript configuration library from developers. Using typescript as an ops frontend has made operations a lot more approachable to folks.

Recently I took what learnt in the last 2 years using jkcfg/typescript and taken it to Deno in form of an opinionated port of jkcfg called: dxcfg[2]. Its early days, but I would bet on Deno/typescript for future ops configuration.

[1] https://jkcfg.github.io/#/ [2] dxcfg: https://github.com/dxcfg/dxcfg