This is almost too devoid of content (opinion is not that) to usefully reply, and I suspect you're gesturing at some more specific point I might agree with, or at least understand.

Declaration is absolutely a coherent and functional design principle. A declarative system is one in which the outcome is specified and the process is not.

This has big payoffs in domains where it's natural. A good example being grammars. It also has hazards, a good example being the performance of algorithms to parse grammars.

We can see where a declarative build system might be a mixed bag, because the process itself is imperative: make is an early attempt to reconcile imperative build processes with a declaration of what circumstances require their triggering. Basically every build system since make has improved on make, but they all do more-or-less what make does.

The design, in short, is proven, as well as declarative but not purely so.

And the ability to reason about the degree to which make is declarative shows that 'declarative' is in fact a coherent idea. But you can't declare software into existence, you must compile it.