Talos is absolutely incredible. There's a learning curve to it, but it's not as steep as it seems.
I started with Ansible, but found myself getting really annoyed at the amount of YAML I was shoveling around for basic things, so I ended up writing a series of bash scripts that rsync files out to where they need to go, run actions when a particular file changes, etc. Provisioning scripts are bundled up and piped to the remote machine over SSH. It's been pretty nice. I'm thinking about building that out into a separate project somewhere.
I'd love to check out what you're working on! The link seems to be broken though.