Ansible has poor performance on larger tasks. Idempotency checks to see whether an action needs to be executed require manual work to set up and time to execute. This also makes it slow to work with cloud resources.

I switched to Terraform years ago for low-level resource provisioning and cloud automation. I still occasionally use it in conjunction with Packer to create AMIs.

The shift to containerized application deployment makes Ansible much less relevant in general.

Dockerfiles are bad at idempotency, but the solution is probably not Ansible.

A big discussion point internally is just speed at even medium scales. I don't know why something like Mitogen is not built-in, as Mitogen is the difference between 12 - 15 minute runs vs 3 minutes flat, even though it has enough other problems.This is growing into some degree of resentment against the tool in the team. There is some murmuring that puppet might just be better to maintain the solid foundation of a fleet of linux systems, after chef was monetized and such. I'm going to send a colleague the idea of persistent connections to test though.