I hate ansible, would rather run a python script at every task

Puppet afficcionado here.
Yes it is heavy, yes there is module dependency hell, it is quite a stack, yes it is in ruby....

But, I absolutely love the reliability, convergence and idempotency of it.

Out of all others I still have yet to find another software project that actually guarantees consistency and manageability of large (and small) infrastructure.

Yes I know kubernetes... Not everything is containerizeable.

Programming vs configuring

@NeatNerdPrime really liked Ansible better in that regard. At least when I was doing DevOps at that level which was a long time ago. Puppet agent had memory leaks and random failed runs or just became unresponsive. Ansible simply worked without an agent and without its issues.

Also heard great things about Nix but haven't used it myself.

@retoor however this is configuration management/automation so also (can be) programming.

Are you forced to use Ansible? I kinda enjoyed working with it when I got the hang of it. However it also really really suited our needs. If shit is simple enough it's just a lot of overhead and concepts that aren't necessary.