> Yeah except it doesn't really work

It does "work", you can download ansible today and use it, it does what it says. Is it the greatest solution for all use cases in infrastructure? Of course not, nothing is. Do people misuse it? Of course too, we're all human.

Regardless of what tooling you use, we're all building houses of cards, and depending on the situation, try to hold down those cards as well as we can, balancing a ton of other needs and requirements.