It's not stripped down, but Pulumi is a version of this. Regular code, and all the benefits and drawbacks of that approach, in your language(s) of choice to create infrastructure.
I haven't used Pulumi, but I have used Terraform (years ago). That is pretty much exactly what I am talking about, but instead of creating a new language, just use an already established language meant for scripting.
We're trying to do something very similar to what the OP proposes at our current company (Kurtosis), and we explored YAML, Jsonnet, Dhall, CUE, and general-purpose languages and eventually settled on Starlark: https://docs.kurtosis.com/explanations/starlark#why-did-kurt...
BLUF: Infrastructure seems to live in this weird "configuration code" space between pure config (YAML) and actual code. You want reusable config, but you don't want to have to understand the complexities of a real codebase. Jsonnet, Dhall, and CUE all have the simplicity you want, but we found the DSL we'd need to write to be rough. Starlark hits this very nice balance of safety and ease-of-readability (and as a bonus is basically just Python). We've been very happy with it so far.
I've started using this setup for my Nim projects. I created a project that lets me use Nim instead of YAML for a statically checked configuration system. It can be run and output json, yaml, or run as is in Nim code. Its been much nicer than pure YAML! https://github.com/elcritch/ants/tree/main
