I've never worked anywhere sizeable that uses ansible to manage kubernetes. My one brush with it was at a small shop and it caused more problems that it solved. It was just a couple of guys that happened to use ansible for everything else, right or wrong, it seemed like a lot of "i've got a hammer..."

In the pre-managed kubernetes world I did see an ansible stack for standing up a cluster that seemed ok, but once you get past setting up a base cluster ready to take 'customer' workloads ansible is just not a great tool.

I completely agree that for managing the host nodes/machines, Ansible is a huge win. Though this article focuses on deploying ON the cluster.

Ideally the complexity of deploying ON a cluster (i.e. 'kubectl apply') doesn't increase with its size. In some ways it actually gets simpler, as you can worry less about per-node scheduling due to resource constraints/packing.