I didn’t try many of them. I use Ansible for my job, but sometimes I hate it. I would try Terraform/OpenTofu or Salt if I were looking for alternative.

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you don’t really need to scale a homelab that much

Maybe. But you never know this beforehand.

if something breaks, you just want to quickly fix it manually because “doing the Ansible” is more of a pain

In most cases you just need to replay a playbook for quick fix. But I agree that the proper fix will likely take a longer time (while downtime is much shorter).

now idempotency and documentation-as-code is out of the window.

Let @BruisedMoose@piefed.social decide.

P. S. I don’t like Ansible, other tools can be easier to use. But I don’t want to recommend something concrete.

It is hard, if even possible, to keep documentation up-to-date. Better use a configuration management system (salt, ansible etc.) for your servers. Yes, you need to learn how to use it. Yes, it will take a longer time to make changes in your configuration. But as a result you’ll have a self-documented configuration-as-a-code that will allow you to scale your setup as you need. Reproducing something won’t require reading your notes, remembering your actions etc.