it is possible to reduce your query w/case statements to essentially "all cost of all employees" if you would model every type of employee and cost relationally (and then some view for all-employees which is the union of each type projecting the approptiate cost and so on) then your query gets to just ask for records again without having to "tell how" those things are to become records.
I dont think html is anything like sql (only in the sense that all markup languages are also declarative) but a comprable situation would be if you were trying to render some ascii art in html and had to use pre tags in order to tell the layout engine how to show it.
It is not possible, but it is the future, you already have a glimpse with chatgpt creating sql for you. Now that is real, 100% declarative SQL, no debate on that, as everything will be some-when in the future.
You are describe here the abstraction you create on a primitive (related to the system you design) system, and introduce ideas like "employee" "unions" etc If you do good job, when you programming you combine generic purpose systems and introducing new ideas in a way that another human can understand (words), but in certain way you "made the computer system understand" those things too. That's your job. So basically you teach SQL server that a union employee is a thing with the dbo.IsEmployeeUnion function.
In case of html you are not introducing new things. You actually can, because the browser is really flexible (like i make a non-functional quasi elements a lot, to make the html code itself more understandable), but HTML is not designed for you to introduce new elements/ideas (originally, nowadays kinda with CSS). Anyways this is how you see the difference in another way.
I try to tell all of you how the technical details, the implementation does not matter, only just the language itself, when we speak about paradigms, but it seems i'm failing.
By the way, i think training AI models does not fit to any of the paradigms we have here, it's gonna be (or it is?) a new way to solve problems, and that also has nothing to do with files, or any kind of implementation. The important is what you see on the screen, and what you do.
I dont think html is anything like sql (only in the sense that all markup languages are also declarative) but a comprable situation would be if you were trying to render some ascii art in html and had to use pre tags in order to tell the layout engine how to show it.