Right. You kind of want your bare metal OS as vanilla as possible. If you need to nuke and pave, you don’t need to worry about re-applying various configs. Additionally, on a theoretical level, if there’s a bug in something on the bare metal OS, the separation provided by VMs and containers should mean it doesn’t affect the the apps in those VMs / containers.
That seems easier - at least to me - than keeping track of configs in text files or even Ansible playbooks.