That's the exact problem Rancher itself is trying to solve, and it does a pretty fantastic job at it.
Though suggesting its "on par" with CloudFormation suggests that you either know a ton about CloudFormation (anything becomes second nature if you're skilled in it) or you don't know much about either of them. Kubernetes isn't that bad.
K8s YMLs are the baseline, and there are projects to have a lot more ergonomic description interface. They are ugly because they are also static typed and very extensible.
YAML is 1-1 mappable to HCL - because both map to JSON, but the Hashicorp interface seems nicer because it's simpler.
Is YAML engineer a real thing? I always considered YAML to be a slightly hacky configuration DSL that I needed to be familiar with, not an actual core, career, competence.
Of course k8s's YAML API is just a clunky interface, because it's evolving very rapidly, and it's a rather low-level thing. So basically if you work a lot with k8s, it seems like all you do all day is to copy paste [or generate, or parse] YAMLs.
Hmm... nothing against k8s, but it’s deployment api is an abomination on par with aws cloudformation.
You need teams of yaml engineers to manage these things.