I've used those scripts - I've written those scripts! - and I have no idea what you're talking about. Puppet is a marvel, and when it's too heavyweight for the task at hand, there's Ansible. Both are far, far preferable to
me@homebox $ for host in foo bar baz; do cat random_stuff_who_knows_if_it_works.sh | ssh $host 'bash -'; done
Immutable configuration (puppet) is a godsend. No more digging into backups of etc and wondering who wrote something there, when (was it before or after the emergency?) and why. Now you place everything into a repository with commit logs like any piece of code.
That said, immutable configuration is static, so the need for grumpy admin style scripts did not go away. It just reduced.
Oh, I still perpetrate cryptic Bash one-liners myself, on a more or less daily basis. What's nice today, by comparison with the before time, is having a realistic option to do otherwise, and having that option not be Perl.
I had used very readable and documented scripts that would build images, boot VMs, deploy on physicals, configure network devices with hundreds of SLOC by simply calling the right CLI tools instead of (re)writing many thousands of lines in $language.
I was in a company around 2002 doing immutable deployments by updating images from git-tracked config files for whole datacenters.
E.g. calling to debootstrap takes few lines. Generating an ISO. Configuring PXE to serve it...
That must've been amazing, back in the day! The organization was clearly far, far ahead of the curve, not least in that they adopted Git three years or more prior to its initial public release. Fantastic as it no doubt was, though, I'm glad that such awe-inspiring wizardry is no longer required to achieve a similar quality of result.