I assume you consider Ansible to be "declarative". By that definition of "declarative", the following Bash script is also "declarative":

    #!/bin/bash
    rm -f /etc/bar
    mkdir -p /etc/conf.d
    cp -u /srv/src.txt /etc/conf.d/

because Anisble playbook is really just bunch of following statements

    if (!stuff_exists(stuff))
        create_stuff()

which the above utilities in Bash script do with the provided flags.

Ansible "declarativeness" isn't anything worthy of worship. It's plain dumb definition of sequence of steps to take with added guard for each step.

So let's be honest and stop pretending that this "declarativeness" is anything novel or of any value worthy of writing sequence of (guarded) commands in ad-hoc YAML language. Just add some sugar for the pattern above to a decent language and that's all that's needed.