React
The idea here is trying to utilize React's declarative API and diffing algorithm to possibly "render" artifacts/actions and manage updates and dependencies. Referring to this:
One possibility could be implementing a custom renderer which renders artifacts (may be cached?), may be something based on Test Renderer (or similar to React Native's components). Another possibility could be rendering configurations for other provisioners such as: Ansible, Puppet, Chef, a shell provisioner ... etc.
Also using Typescript to write and reuse the components, would offer most validations early enough when writing the configuration files already, increasing the chances of ending up with a working image.
Here is a naive demo of what a declarative definition of a Linux Image might look like. To bear in mind though, this is very naive demo that it isn't even using any special React's state management API, which seems to be an option worth further exploration.