I have tried or used most of the projects cited in the blog post. I pretty much agree with the conclusion that Pyinfra looks the most promising at this point. I've also tried Bundlewrap (https://bundlewrap.org/) a couple of years ago though I lack the perspective to compare them. Another interesting project not cited in the post is Nuka (https://doc.bearstech.com/nuka/).

Some personal perspectives:

I have used Ansible in the past and didn't like it.

I have used Fabric and Fabtools many years ago (Fabtools happens to be written by a friend) and I agree that something like Fabtools is needed to make Fabric relevant. Fabric has a completely revamped version, which was quite long in the making, but not fairly stable, but AFAIK Fabric 2 doesn't (yet) have something similar to what Fabtools was to Fabric 1.

I had great hope for opsmop (https://github.com/opsmop/opsmop) by Ansible's creator, which was supposed to address Ansible's shortcomings, but he dropped the project (citing lack of traction) a few months after starting it in 2018.

At this point I'm sticking to Fabric 2, but I'm still looking for alternatives.

I'm also wondering if Augeas (https://augeas.net/ - a configuration editing tool which parses configuration files for a large set of software in their native formats and transforms them into a tree) could be used in combination with one the of tools mentioned in the post to ease the parts related to managing configuration.