The thing about ansible is to always remember that it really is just a backup python script that gets copied to your server and executed. Yes it works quite well, but you have to be careful to not have break on you.
For me the difference to nix is, that my bud expression will actually always produce the same output or tell me it can’t. Instead of ansible which will fail after some updates went past.
My journey was:
I left Debian for Ubuntu when it simply worked better and left Ubuntu when it became too restrictive and weird. I need a working system but my freedom to experiment. Then I discovered arch and never looked back. Still kept Debian on servers.
Currently using arch on desktop machines and nixos on my servers. But I use nix for Dev environments and dotfiles even on arch.
Not sure if I’ll stay with NixOS but for now that seems like the direction I’m going to. Still love Arch Linux for it’s freedom though, but I’m getting older and don’t have the time to fiddle with everything.