So instead of an ansible playbook/role that installs, say, nginx from the distro package repository, and then pushes some specific configuration, I have a dockerfile that does the same thing? Woohoo?
Other issues like secrets and environment management is something I find way more annoying using a tool like Chef.
Try doing a chef policyfile bootstrap that gets some secrets using its own built in chef vault. You can’t do it without wild workarounds because the node isn’t granted access to secrets until it becomes a registered node, and it doesn’t register until a chef client run completes successfully. It’s a really dumb catch-22 design.
The solution is “just use a big 3 cloud secrets vault or Hashicorp vault” and that’s fine but it’s really strange that the tool can’t handle something so simple on its own.