> I don't know at this point how often I've read that something is better because it's modern and declarative. Why it's easy to understand because it's declarative, etc.

I feel most comments here miss the point of declerative systems - resillience.

You write a script to stand up an Application on a clean system, a declarative system does the same. But what if current state is not a blank slate? A declarative system is meant to be smart enough to achieve target state even if machine crahsed half way through the setup last time, or has a different config already running.

Writing a shell script that addresses all edgecases is hard. Now, declarative systems do fail, but that's the promice.