[elevation]

Bash is better than ansible for configuring the core infrastructure underneath ansible.

In a devops workflow you "treat servers like cattle instead of pets" but your org still needs a few pets. Some host you control must either host DNS or manage your DNS provider's API key. Same for CA, IdP, git, backup and monitoring services, and the ansible machine itself. You'll have to manually configure these things before your "cattle" tools can run.

Once you're up and running, it's possible to make ansible manage it own dependencies, but this introduces circular dependencies complicates bootstrapping (consider a disaster recovery situation) and amplifies both the impact of faults and the difficulty of troubleshooting them. Do you want to be debugging python dependencies in the middle of the night so you can finally get ansible to execute the couple bash commands that will bring your ACME CA back up? I'd rather run bash directly.

At a small scale with a stable set of requirements, your core infrastructure is better served by a good operations manual and a simple deployment toolset with minimal dependencies. Plain bash fits the bill!