> Anything that causes a persistent change of the state of a system is imperative, regardless of how detailed the command is.

No. That's more to do with imperative vs functional programming, which is a subset of declarative, but even then you can't simply say "I changed state so it's imperative." That's a drastic oversimplification. That's like saying Haskell can't write to a file, which is plainly false. Declarative (functional) can absolutely change the state of the system. It just doesn't let you do it except by calling fixed commands, which is exactly what `INSERT` is.

When we're talking about imperative vs declarative, state can still be manipulated in both, but it's abstracted away with declarative programming. Like, a `filter()` or a `map()` transform in JavaScript is declarative programming, even in an otherwise imperative language. That's why it returns a new object with an updated state.