> The fundamental design of Ansible is that you do imperative steps to reach an end state.

No, the fundamental design of configuration management systems (Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Salt, CFEngine) is that they are declarative. You say "this software should be installed, this user should exist, these files should have these contents and permissions, etc" and they figure out the right steps to take on your OS to move from the current state to your desired end state.

You are right though that they can produce unexpected results since they do not describe the entire system from the ground up.