I really like Ansible and have used it for my personal dotfiles for years. I don’t think it’s a silver bullet and I’m aware of a lot of the criticism. Containerization or immutable infra solves more production problems so I don’t really use it much at work.
At least in the devops/SRE circles I work in, we know there are different tools for different jobs. While we might fight about which is the best, I haven’t seen the ossification you’re describing.