So no experience with Ansible itself (I use masterless Saltstack), but I don't agree with the idea of removing configuration-as-code. Once you learn how to do it, its not a lot of effort to use it instead of interactively installing packages and editing config. And the benefits are huge because you know everything needed to re-do your server are here, ready to be used.

Agree on the other points, no need for k8s or anything on a small server.