> Ansible is a complete mess. You're better off managing things with Puppet or Salt, as that gives you an actual declarative mechanism

We thought this, too, when choosing Salt over Ansible, but that was a complete disaster.

Ansible is definitely designed to operate at a lower abstraction level, but modules that behave like desired state declarations actually work very well. And creating your own modules turned out to be at least an order of magnitude easier than in Salt.

We do use Ansible to manage containers via podman-systemd, but slightly hampered by Ubuntu not shipping with podman 5. It's... fine?

Our mixed Windows, Linux VM and Linux bare metal deployment scenario is likely fairly niche, but Ansible is really the only tenable solution.