[hericium]

Sounds reasonable. Personally, I just try to stay away from k8s until it becomes a requirement. Until then simplest tools are often a good choice for building systems that require less maintenance. That's a per-project decision though.

You do not need Ansible for VMs provisioning - you can bake a VM image that will pull repos and do other preparation stuff. HashiCorp Packer[1] is an good tool for this imo. This applies to bare metal, too, as you can bake ISO or IMG the same way. Stuff that differentiates those systems can be set up with cloud-init or something similar.

Regarding Ansible, it didn't changed much over the years. At least nothing really major like statefulness.

But again, I'm not opposite to using Ansible when a project reasonably calls for it. Proper tool for configuring multiple systems with details generated for/by other systems, say multi-cloud HA provisions, clustering etc.

[1] https://www.packer.io/