I don’t think Ansible is a good solution. It’s kinda a meh middle ground between reproducible system (which is hard to actually do well with Ansible) and simply using backups/snapshots. Ansible introduces a lot of overhead, but does not provide particularly strong reproducibility guarantees. There’s no really advantage to treating config differently from data unless you want to use revision control (and simple backups are not enough) or have some tricky config generation to do.

In a lot of cases, especially if you are gonna be moving between machines, rather than scaling horizontally, your machines don’t need to be reproducible. You can just restore a backup and tweak the new stuff (network configuration, etc). This gets rid of an entire class of complexity and lets you just do things once (rather than figuring something out and encoding into config management DSL).

If you actually need reproducibility, then it makes sense to go all the way. Something like NixOS provides stronger guarantees than Ansible. There is definitely a larger learning curve than Ansible though.