This will probably seem an odd question, but is there any way to use the pulumi API’s without the declarative plan and apply bits? For example, I’d like to just have a program that runs

const deployment = new k8s.apps.v1.Deployment(...)

and have it create it right then and there.

No, not at all. In fact, pulumi uses teraform under the hood to do the actual work. I suggest looking at the client libraries for individual services.

Note that we only use TF for certain providers (AWS, Azure, and GCP). We do not use TF for Kubernetes. The Pulumi engine itself does not use Terraform.

today i learned, thanks