Technical and implementation details again. When we speak about programming paradigm, we speak about the language alone, not any software system, this is a theoretical discussion. It does not matter how it is executed, what matter is how you express yourself in that language to achieve your goals.

There are no bits, bytes and cpus in this conversation. This is classification and taxonomy of artificial languages created for other purpose than communication between 2 persons.

In SQL you gives instruction in a functional way of thinking. Functional programming is a restricted variation of imperative one for a purpose the same way how object oriented programming is basically structured programming with restrictions imposed on the programmer (for a purpose again, and a very good reason for that). So fundamentally SQL is imperative, but the details of that completely hidden and therefore irrelevant.

In HTML you describe the result itself. So "SQL would only be declarative if the user literally wrote the entire result set of the query" is not completely, but somewhat true. The way how you define a result can vary, but SQL definitely does not do that. But the way how i can imagine SQL as declarative, if i "programming by example" or ask chatgpt to translate my natural language and create the query. But these are forced examples, because IMO SQL is absolutely not declarative, and cant really be.

If HTML is a programming language or not, it's debatable, but i think it's enough that is a language (programming or not) which is designed to describe a flow-kind of a text layout (like a word file) in the first versions, then other visible elements, so i think it's not completely, but kinda irrelevant question from the viewpoint of paradigm.