Things would work both ways, of course. For me the difference is a) the extent to which I want to make the domain model explicit, and b) how much I value build-time elimination of bugs vs run-time flexibility.

Data-driven approaches leave a lot implicit, meaning that it can be hard to answer the question, "What's really possible here?" And they can only be verified to the extent you have all the data, which usually means a lot of checks are deferred to run time.