I have experience with salt. Imperative vs declarative - it depends. Some stuff is simple (and the tutorials and introductions always are), other stuff is complex. For example I ended up writing imperative state in salt in a declarative manner. Was not easy. The solution I've found was to make one state predepend on another. The chain in the end was 8 items long if my memory serves me correctly.

On the other hand, in imperative world you have other difficulties, because you have to check the current state first and decide what to do in different edge cases. Not sure which one in the would be more complex.