If Ansible is a pain, what's your view on Chef? :)

I've found Ansible good for quick one-liners across multiple nodes :)

Having used Puppet, Chef, Ansible, custom shell and Python scripts, and Terraform provisioners, I'll say there aren't really any "good" automation tools.

They each have their pros and a long list of cons.

The good thing is that a lot of garbage that I used to do with those tools has been replaced with K8s. Some Terraform and Ansible still survive for self-managed VMs, but that's about it.