I agree with your conclusions that the world is becoming more declarative and that we need to converge on an agnostic system to make these declarations.

However, you might've been trained incorrectly, perhaps as a joke, because you've assigned properties to the opposite solutions!

Configuration management like Ansible or Salt are agnostic modules that can be plumbed under the hood to work with any platform: use Ansible's "copy" module and it can be implemented under the hood as cp, rsync, passenger pigeon, whatever. You can use the same playbook against any target, including targets that run on orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.

Kubernetes Operators, on the other hand, are tightly linked to Kubernetes internals. They are not declarative; they require explicit instruction on how to manage your application's lifecycle, implemented in a statically-typed programming language. Indeed, if your system doesn't need to muck around in the Kubernetes internals, you don't create an "Operator", you just use the pre-baked object types like Service, Deployment, etc.

So I agree in principle, but Kubernetes is the opposite of what you've expressed here.