Comment by evanelias

One of the many benefits of declarative tooling is the ability to easily see if an environment's state differs from expectations, and then bring it back to the desired state automatically in a minimal number of steps. Generally this is much faster than tearing down and re-creating the environment from scratch.

You can still use declarative tooling to replace an environment, or spin up a new environment, whether persisted or ephemeral. Declarative tools are faster at this as well, relative to a traditional migration system which has to apply a full history of iterative DDL (e.g. multiple ALTERs vs a declarative tool's single CREATE).

And of course declarative tools may also be used on production, allowing use of the exact same tool chain in prod as in non-prod.