Ansible is wonderful. I'd strongly consider it if I wasn't against the idea of having interesting enough dotfiles to version.

What I do with RasPi servers is I make a pull and a push playbook that live in a repo, which let me deploy what I have onto a new server, and pull any changes made in server web GUIs into the repo where I can commit them.

Then of course any other random periodic task also becomes an Ansible task.

If I had a use case for lots of random little scripts on my main machine, I think I'd choose Ansible over bash where practical, you get so many tools premade, and you can run local or remote all the same.

I used to manage my dotfiles with stow (xstow actually) and do some simple links. Now I run an Ansible playbook that creates links or copy depending on the files and also install tools on different OSes.

The big benefit is that it can be organized in a modular way with roles and tags, and sensitives files (like my gpg keys...) can be encrypted with the vault.

I’m slowly trying to make ansible playbook that pulls in my dot files and installs everything I need (node, rust, go, all my CLTs, etc).