This is a hurdle, but IMO it's not too annoying if you already have rights to install packages. Just automate interpreter installation in bash if it's not already there. Way too much time and money is invested in fighting the esoteric crannies of Bourne shell when the logic would be much clearer in Ruby or Python.

Ansible's moment in the sun is fading now that Docker came onto the scene, but that was a glorious moment. It's still very useful for anyone with long-running, non-removable machines. Ansible requires Python and allows a great deal of behavior to be defined in simple YAML instructions.

Maybe try Crystal (https://crystal-lang.org/) then. It has many of the benefits of Go and a Ruby-like syntax. It feels even more like a scripting language than Go because of awesome type inference, uses a similar model as Go for concurrency, and even has proper generics ;-)

Agreed. I recently transitioned from Rails development to devops, and there's no Ruby on any system by default. My Bash got better fast!

Fortunately Elixir/Erlang releases include all the executables you'll need. They aren't quite as slick as Go binaries, which all live in one file, but it's still pretty cool.

Then Python is a good alternative, it's basically already installed everywhere.