I struggle to understand why declarative tools are apparently so much more difficult to use than imperative. Why is it my team can, with great mediocrity, write a shell script, but cannot write a terraform or ansible to do the same?

Why is it they can follow a recipe to kind of make a mint birthday cake but they can't point at a picture of a cake on a picture menu and say "that one!"

Sometimes I think they don't actually know what they want before they start. And as the script evolves, like finger painting, they start to kind of like the blobs ...

But, I dont work at a software company. I just work at an enterprise with a large IT department.