Traditional Infrastructure-as-Code solutions were based on edge-triggers. Like create ingress, delete ingress. But what about when ingress misbehaves or is in an unrecoverable state?

Kubernetes introduced edge-triggered level-driven with resync reconciliation based "controllers". User defines a state and the controller does it's best to keep the infra in this desired state all the times. (Although Terraform has also moved to this same design in recent times)

This establishes a consistent experience. Everyone knows you just need to do kubectl get my-resource to check your desired state. All the issues will be logged in status and controller. You can combine multiple controllers to achieve your desired application design. For example, Knative has their own kind called "Service" which has some custom components, some inherited from istio and things like replicasets from default kubernetes controllers.