Kind of. From a brief look, it looks very framework-y and all-or-nothing (though I could be wrong, they do have a page about gradual adoption at least https://www.pulumi.com/docs/guides/adopting/).

I was picturing something more low level and less opinionated, though I can only guess how such a thing would perform in practice.

Not even necessarily a specific product, just the adoption of workflows that use already existing tools (e.g. the various API client libraries - for AWS, Kubernetes, git, docker registry, etc.) to achieve this. I realize that that could lead to reinventing the wheel, and eventually an in-house framework anyway, but it feels a lot more comfortable to start there, as you can design things closer to your exact needs.

Pulumi definitely looks interesting though.