Docker, k8s, Terraform etc are nice. I make extensive use of them too. But in my opinion they can't be used for everything, because mutable infrastructure is a reality of the world that must be accounted for at some point. For example, at my employer we have on-prem k3s clusters running on bare metal servers. Chef is a perfect tool to manage those, because they are by their nature not something we can treat as stateless, immutable configurations.

It seems to me that this is kind of like abstraction levels in programming. If you can use a high level language with lots of powerful tools, you do. But some people have to live in the world of C or even assembly, because (as James Mickens said) you can't just place a Lisp book on top of an x86 chip and hope it learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. I view IaC tools in the same way: if you can use Terraform or Docker, great! But someone has to use lower level tools to provide the environment in which those things exist. And that's why people shouldn't look at Chef (or other similar tools) as outdated, any more than assembly is outdated just because Lisp exists. They still very much have a strong use case that won't ever go away.

The client/server model is why I like Chef more than Ansible, tbh. Having my machines run a service which pulls configuration on a schedule is, to me, much saner and easier to manage than having to push configuration from a central source over ssh. But that is obviously just my preference, and if someone doesn't like the client/server model then I can totally understand if they don't like Chef as a result.

> the client/server model and its knock on effects (IIRC, needing to upload changes with knife?) was annoying

It also has tons of advantages, notably around scale (Ansible id very slow when working with thousands of machines) and ensuring that there is no drift. Also e.g. SaltStack (RIP) has cool features such as reactor to react to events on the machine which are only possible because there's an agent

Different use cases, probably.

I use Ansible personally when I'm dealing with a server or two. I use Puppet professionally when I am dealing with tens of thousands of servers and trying to keep them all in some kind of unity.

You do indeed need to upload cookbook changes with knife; but if you keep your cookbooks in Git you can set up CI/CD pipelines that spawn a container that runs the knife upload steps for you (and even do validation via cookstyle before). Then all you need to do after changing your cookbooks and/or recipes is to commit those changes to your Git repo and watch the CI/CD pipeline do it's thing.

You could use Chef in local mode and pull down the cookbooks from s3 or something.