One way to get started could be to initially ignore ansible playbooks, just install ansible onto your control machine. Write an inventory file with one or more hostnames of machines you want to manage. See if you can get ansible to connect with ssh and "ping" all the machines. Once you're comfortable with executing one-off commands through ansible, the jump to ansible-playbook will be smaller.
I understand what you're saying but do understand that to other people these can be concepts that they arn't familiar with or might actively struggle with
That said - were there any obstacles you faced when you started with Ansible?
What could have been better (tooling/docs/training/etc) to get you upto speed better/faster?
This is after one day of interacting with Ansible. I did have previous experience with Linux and setting up Circle.ci projects and Dockerfile. There are not many concepts to grok. I just cloned a playbook on GitHub and tried to rewrite it to fit my needs, reading documentation over the part I did not understand well. No book or video tutorials were needed.
What if I gave you 2 docker containers:
1. one with ansible loaded and ready to go
2. another one with just SSH running that you can point the above to and experiment with
If you don't know docker - that's ok! It's easy and I will set you up to do that. let me know
This way, you don't have to mess around with either installing ansible or setting up VMsVPS/hosts blah blah