That was why any moderate to large Chef installation always turned out to be such a nightmare in practice - it was so easy to break out of the DSL, so people ended up swaddling it in impenetrable, unmaintainable spaghetti code. Ansible was a real breath of fresh air when it first came along!

This is just the pendulum swinging back again, and at least Python tends to be a little less "clever" (and therefore less write-only) than Ruby.

It seems to me that infra management is inherently suited to declarative logic. I'm pragmatic enough to understand why SWEs with little infra experience might prefer an imperative approach, but I tend to think you should pick one or the other and stick to it. In my experience, hybrid systems end up combining the worst aspects of both.