I went with Ansible way back when all these were fairly new, because it was not just possible, but considered "culturally", if you will, normal, in that ecosystem, to run it agentless. Having to run a config agent on the target system always felt like a smell, and begging for trouble.
But yaml's friggin' terrible, that's simply true.
Agreed. Puppet Bolt has been better to me than Ansible, especially around Playbook YAML vs the Puppet DSL. Puppet seemed to fall out of the limelight when Ansible made it big, then Bolt got little love.
I find it ok as long as you're using persistent connections (which also significantly reduce connection time for all other SSH sessions). Add something like this to ~/.ssh/config:
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath ~/.ssh/persist/%r@%h:%p
ControlPersist 15m
What happened to Salt? I felt like it was everywhere in 2015, but I almost never hear of it anymore. Even their official documentation site has an ad promoting "SaltConf 2021", a conference from nearly two years ago.