All the responses you got so far suggest exactly what this "Ask HN" actually wants to avoid: Terraform, AMI, Packer, Ansible, Chef ..., the list goes on

Here is my suggestion for keeping it simple, by solely relying on skills you will need anyways: git and shell scripting.

- Write a shell script that executes all those commands you would run manually to set up your system.

- Put up a git repository in the `/` directory, `.gitignore` everything by default, and explicitly git-notignore all those configuration files and user files/maintenance scripts which are relevant for your environment. Use githooks to also track/restore file permissions and ownerships of these tracked files.