I'd say we're in agreement w.r.t. the first point. While configuration files seem to be declarative in that they describe the properties of something rather than the steps to build it, they fall prey to many of the same issues that make imperative code inelegant.

As to the second point, the prime example I had in mind was the difference between Grunt/WebPack and gulp. Grunt encourages gigantic configuration files while gulp provides a set of primitives which can be programmatically manipulated and composed to produce the desired effect.