I have mixed feelings about it. On my first startup, I used ansible to automate all of the manual workflows and server setup that we had done. Everything was just completely manual and in people's heads before, and translating it to ansible was a pain in the ass to say the least. I don't think it would have been any easier to translate it to something else though. It ended up working fine and we had a solid system that I could reset up our environment from scratch on a set of VPS provided by some terraform scripts. We were originally on digitalocean, and had to migrate to Azure because of acquisition BS.

For my current startup I ended up not going a direction where I needed ansible. I've now got everything in helm charts and deployable to K8S clusters, and packaged with Dockerfiles. Not really missing ansible, but not exactly in love with K8S either. It works well enough I guess.

> on a set of VPS provided by some terraform scripts

You ended up needing Terraform too for the infrastructure though. At that point why not just use Terraform?