Ansible 4.0.0 final has been released

Meh. Used to use Ansible a lot but once I get into Terraform/AWS and Docker/ECS, I've had little need for it. Just ship the whole docker image. Terraform really delivered on declarative configuration in a way that made imperative Ansible obsolete for me.

Compared to what? I think it won over its direct competitors of Salt / Puppet / Chef, though there's more than that now. It's not ubiquitous, but it's pretty common, and useful, even if the syntax is truly inscrutable.

I feel like it's pretty well used for persistent installations that just need regular config updates, and we have better tools for VMs that get spun up independently for every reconfiguration.

On my local market extremely. Chef and Puppet are used by some single companies that started their "infrastructure as code" (or similar) journey a long time ago, but most companies I know and people I work with/interviewed use Ansible.

It's easy to jump into, it helped me a lot in the past to push my companies into automation while still having a lot of legacy software, servers, network. Does not exclude using other tools, like Terraform (while could be it's replacement in many cases).

In "let's go Kubernetes" era I still don't mind investing in Ansible automation for preparing servers, doing software deployments and so on. There is Packer that works great, so several years of development of our old tools and old school software deployments will not be lost. It will be reused while doing heavier adoption of containers and K8s.