> Fundamentally, the argument seems to come down to "you don't have a record of what you once asked the API server to do", and that's fair enough - you don't. But that has nothing to do with imperative or declarative models.

You do actually have this record. First of all, because k8s has an audit log, and secondly because deployments maintain a revision history (so you can always rollback--kubectl even supports this via `kubectl rollback undo`).