I'm finding quite the opposite. IMHO saltstack, more importantly sls files are insanely simple and clear whereas ansible playbooks appear very "busy" for lack of a better term. It's likely a personal preference in my case but I've found salt to have a relatively clean interface and to be very readable even when coupled with templating.
Ansible is generally designed around being maximally auditable. For instance, an IT manager said he can write a list of tasks and take them to someone and it's easy for him, not knowing Ansible, to see what is going on. That's important to us because they are quick to prototype and don't end up looking like Perl.
Generally we discourage templating except in playbooks, because we don't like the idea of playbooks turning into code, and I don't like the idea of mixing a lot of Jinja2 syntax along with YAML syntax at the same time.
Playbooks can be broken up into small files if they get long.
This also keeps them machine readable, so if you wanted to later write a script to analyze them, you could. So it's very important for us that our files are actually valid YAML.
Because they are, they aren't a description that gets compiled for one server at a time, but are instead a process, so it's easy to have the steps on one server influence a server later on down the line.
I'm not sure of an example of a 'busy' playbook you've seen, but I'd suspect it's probably just needing some whitespace in between lines.
To me, while they may have taken some interesting choices here and there, I don't care for their format since it seems to have taken Puppet syntax and made it more obscure -- and the idea of mixing template loops and such in there and having two interlaced languages is too much.