TL;DR: Salt is complex, multi-purpose tool, with event-driven orchestration and remote execution engine capabilities. In other words, it implicitly does what Ansible can do, plus many other things. What I personally like the most is the ease to develop and extend features, vs., e.g., a clogged DSL as many popular tools (unfortunately) impose.

I was under the impression it was a direct competitor to the likes of Ansible, Chef, etc. (all differ in their approaches but it's effectively the same problem space)

Unaware of a specific infosec slant.

It's Ansible, plus the total lack of noticing when you've gone too far inventing cutesy nicknames totally devoid of any meaningful connection to the concept they are supposedly describing.