You Were Never Declaring State. You Were Observing By Hand.
Every Terraform file you ever wrote was a note to a blind tool. You looked at your infrastructure, decided what it should be, wrote that decision into HCL, and handed it to a program that could not see for itself. The declaration was your observation, pre-computed and frozen into a file. The same was true for Chef recipes, Puppet manifests, and CFEngine promises. You observed the system. You wrote down what you saw and what you wanted. You gave that note to an agent that could parse files but could not look around. ...