I dislike Ansible but have not been able to find a better replacement. So I’m rooting for you!
For design inspiration, you might like to review the work done on JetPorch, a deploy tool by Michael DeHaan, the original Ansible developer. DeHaan worked on this project for a year-ish, then abandoned the project. But IMO his design was very good! You can find the archived JetPorch repo here: ~mpdehaan/jetporch - the Jet Enterprise Professional Orchestrator - sourcehut git
