I wouldn't be "surprised" that somebody wants better instance CM. I also don't care and I can't particularly fault the Pulumi folks for putting it on the back burner too; as each of the major instance CM providers are in the process of demonstrating, it doesn't make money and is being eaten by a container-centric and pervasively disposable approach.t I've stopped caring about machines enough to write even a systemd unit file and it's a better world to live in.

You can write instance CM yourself, I'd you want. Pulumi isn't a "cloud thing", it's a lifecycle management tool. But it's typed, and that absolves it of many, many sins given the incredibly positive surface it presents to a developer.