If you're not Google, please for the love of god, please consider just launching a monolith and database on a Linux box (or two) in the corner and see how beautifully simple life can be.

You can literally get a Linux box (or two) in the corner and run:

  curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -
  cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
  ...(json/yaml here)
  EOF

The mental gymnastics required to express oneself in yaml, rather than, say, literally anything else

Like, brainfuck? Like bash? Like Terraform HCL puppet chef ansible pile-o-scripts? The effort required to output your desired infrastructure's definition as JSON shouldn't really be that gargantuan. You express yourself in anything else but it can't be dumped to JSON?