I think that's.. perhaps not orthogonal, but has some orthogonal component - you could certainly have something like:

  for i in range(100):
      ip = cidrhost(subnet, i)
      if exists := get_server(ip):
          continue
      create_server(ip=ip)

and so on. I don't like it, but because it's procedural/imperative, not because it's particularly more 'petty' than the Terraform (or equivalent) would be.

For me it's more about what I'm doing, conceptually. I want a server to exist, it to have access to this S3 bucket, etc. - the logic of how to interface with the APIs to make that happen, to manage their lifecycle and check current state etc. isn't what I'm thinking about. (In Terraform terms, that belongs in the provider.) When I write the above I'm just thinking I want 100 servers, so:

  resource "cloud_server" "my_servers" {
    count = 100

    ip = cidrhost(subnet, count.index)
    # and so on
  }

comes much more naturally.