I'm really not sure that this is a bad thing.
> there isn't a good way to "see" what the real world is like
If the IaC system had the same under-the-hood functionality as System Initiative, what's to stop someone from also building a GUI visualization of the IaC-code?
So what we do instead is have a reactive data model, and shift the code part to a reactive graph of functions.
The same way you update any other code from multiple places. A version control system (eg.: git and github), with CI/CD.
> How do you visualize drift?
Why do you have drift in the first place? Gitops is an obvious solution to drift.
> It’s easy enough to imagine how you would update a single declaration, but thinking about how to make the code reactive will break your brain.
I’m sorry, I don’t follow at all here. I’m not sure what the problem is with IaC. If your IaC is declarative, it’s no more complicated than data.