I have a vested interest in this argument, because it comes up all the time. From your argument, it's apparent you've never written a program in anything except a configuration language.

But by your own admission:

> You are not declaring what it looks like, you are writing instructions for how to produce declarative

If this was true, a Pulumi program would look like this:

    const bucket = new aws.s3.Bucket()

    if (bucket) {
      // do something
    } else {
      // do something else
    }

If you'd written anything in Pulumi you'd know that isn't how it works. The only imperative part of Pulumi is your ability to manipulate the DAG, for example:

    const config = pulumi.Config()
    const createBucket = config.reqiureBool("createBucket")

    if (createBucket) {
     new aws.s3.Bucket()
   }

Now, is there an imperative statement in there? Yes, but the only imperative part is your decision to include or exclude the bucket itself from the declarative end state. You do _exactly_ the same thing in Terraform but with a less intuitive syntax:

    resource "aws_s3_bucket" "example" {
      count = 0
    }

By that definition, if Pulumi is imperative, so is Terraform. It's not though, and you're wrong.