Projects are making this easier. For example moving from large mono config files to using conf.d/ directories where you can drop in extra files and manage each one independently is great for IaC.

While it's challenging up front I do enjoy being able to freshly install the latest version of Fedora, run my playbook and be more or less up and running.

It feels cleaner and more reliable (at least until this week when a broken selinux policy made it to stable) rather then trying to upgrade packages across major release versions in place.

<hat material="tinfoil"> If I've somehow acquired secret hidden malware or someone has opened up something to come back in later that's also going to get flushed out at least once every six months.