Ansible has a non-trivial transition cost (speaking from experience here). Cloning VMs is a legitimate stopgap measure, because that’s sometimes the best you can do if available engineer hours are tight.
Ansible (as a proxy for infrastructure as code in general) being hard to implement is a warning that your setup is too convoluted. Cloning VMs is the high-interest unsecured loan of tech debt, and when that bill comes due it’s going to be much worse than spending a few days on some scripting.
Completely agree on all points, except for "few days". It took much longer than that, but partly due to learning Ansible as I went. The pain was still worth it, though.