What i think we really need:

1. A low-level, open-ended language for describing infrastructure; it should have absolutely no facilities for abstraction, should be human-legible and machine-readable (so based on JSON, probably), and should be applicable to everything from configuring physical hosts and switches up to containers.

2. For each kind of infrastructure, a tool which can apply that language to the infrastructure; one for AWS, one for physical hosts, one for Kubernetes i suppose, etc.

3. Tools and libraries for producing documents in that language from more expressive, concise sources; could be a YAML-to-language compiler, could be a classic Ruby DSL, could be a Python API, could be this guy's CSS idea, could be a GPT prompt, whatever.

Mostly, i want options for the last part to include libraries in sensible programming languages. Then i can just write real code, with full abstractive power, and the possibility of unit tests etc, to define my infrastructure, run it, and feed the output to the applier tool. No more enterprise YAML engineering. No more trying to shoehorn abstraction into Jinja2 templates. Just normal code.

Because the code produces the language, rather than operating on resource directly, writing a new library / DSL / whatever, based on a cool new model which will solve everyone's problems, becomes very easy. You don't have to build a whole IaC tool from scratch.

It also means you have an obvious and simple checkpoint to apply diffing, linting, security checks, etc. Not on the input code, but on the resulting document.

And it means you have one place you can always look to determine the ground truth of what is going on.