Pulumi may be declarative, but you use imperative languages to define your end state. The language you're actually writing your Pulumi in is what's most relevant to the point I'm making about maintainability. HCL isn't turing comlete, but even if it was, the point is that doing the types of things you can do in Python or other "real" languages is a major pain in HCL which effectively discourages you from doing that. I'm arguing that is actually a good thing for maintainability.
