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IMHO, the issue is that Ansible uses YAML to do "programming language" sorts of things, which is why it feels so unnatural.
I tried an experiment last year: What if Ansible had Python rather than YAML syntax. https://github.com/linsomniac/uplaybook?tab=readme-ov-file#s...
The downside is that having full Python available makes it really easy to make your playbooks non-idempotent, which Ansible gate-keeps behind Ansible modules. Also someone raised a concern that full Python (rather than a more limited safe dialect like Starlark) would make it harder to trust third-party playbooks. But considering uPlaybook's use case (ansible-like system configuration) it feels like even with a restricted dialect it is going to have plenty of opportunity for nefarious purposes.
I've put out uPlaybook for some limited review among my friends, and I've gotten some excitement about it. It doesn't have fleet management and remote running though, which is the big negative feedback I've gotten. I'm interested in thoughts on it though.
Haven't used it in anger yet, but I have high hopes for PyInfra: https://github.com/pyinfra-dev/pyinfra
They support for-if from python, too: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/templates/#loop-f... but I haven't tried the "recursive" keyword to know if ansible supports that. I say "ansible supports that" because they don't just drop jinja2 into ansible and call it a draw, they have a bunch of custom execution integrations: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.16.3/lib/ansible/...