Maybe you've never worked with someone that sucked at shell scripting, or packaging.
Ansible is awesome for enabling people to do reasonably complicated things in a consistent manner, at scale, without having to write all of the boilerplate code to be able to do so.
This is forgetting the fact that Ansible is reasonably opinionated, which is great for lowering the barrier to entry and helping devs/admins to be productive quickly.
When I just need to Get Shit Done, Ansible is awesome.
I've worked with plenty of people who had no business working in IT, but some of them were smart enough to recognize that they could benefit from education, so I taught them how to correctly and properly program in shell. Others were just insecure assholes who didn't care about working with computers and were in IT just for the money but didn't want anyone to know they're incompetent (even though it was obvious). Those always wanted to needlessly spend money on buying shitty software or using "tools" like "Ansible".
Ansible is awesome for enabling people to do reasonably complicated things in a consistent manner, at scale, without having to write all of the boilerplate code to be able to do so.
This is forgetting the fact that Ansible is reasonably opinionated, which is great for lowering the barrier to entry and helping devs/admins to be productive quickly.
When I just need to Get Shit Done, Ansible is awesome.