Counterpoint: Even on my private VPS, I have all the configuration as code. It gives me peace of mind knowing that when a server comes crashing down for whatever reason, I can reinstall it and bring all services back online with not more than one hour of time invested. Time is precious.

(Also, when someone asks me "how do you configure X", I can just link them to the corresponding place in my system configuration repo on Github.)

I'd be interested in seeing the config if it's public?

Probably https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration

Exactly. The Readme is horribly outdated, but the basic remarks are still true.

I have a small handful of VPSes for personal stuff that, more and more, I'm moving away from manual configuration to using ansible.

The reasons for this are several, but the most pressing are that if one falls over I can spin it up again quickly somewhere else, and I can have a lot of commonality in the configurations between them, so they all have backups configured the same way, or setting up letsencrypt requires editing things in only one place.

It also means I don't have to dig through a bunch of config when I want to work out how stuff is set up three years later, I can just look in one version-controlled directory in a central location.

Not to mention that while configuration management "magic" has taken over (Puppet/Chef - or even something higher level) you still need to set up those and you still need to know where to look when things go wrong.