> Declarative OS management really sticks once you accept that the first few weeks are gonna suck and the first few months are still gonna have friction. But once you get over the hump, the rewards are there to reap.

Only if you don't change your mind and do not decide to try out that new cool distro that just came out 6 months later.

I like declarative management but so far I have sticked to puppet for that. Sure like with ansible puppet needs to be installed first but on the other hand you can quite easily convert/reuse a config for say debian, to ubuntu, arch or fedora. The main differences are usually package names.