How is that different than what Puppet, Chef, CFEngine, or any number of other configuration management tools do [and did long before Ansible]? How do you propose to have a package that requires dynamic configuration supplied by the system (something from dhcp, for example). Are you conflating package management and configuration management? I'm genuinely curious.

It's fine if you don't like it - there are things I don't like about it, but ultimately single packages can't express multi-node configurations very easily. We need something.

While I "grew up" as it were, believing in RPM, we live in a very post-distro, multi-language kind of world, and there's a need for things to glue that together. How many times have I tried to campaign against "wget tarball" as a deployment mechanism, I don't know. It's rough and yes, there's a lack of discipline in ops that needs to improve.

Immutable systems is a VERY interesting way to solve that, but it doesn't work for certain stateful things and you always need something to deploy the undercloud.

I'd encourage you to try to build your own experimental project to try to find different ways to do it, as this is the only real way that technology ever gets ahead.