In this case, I'm not sure if it's abstraction-insanity as much as having common solutions to common problems. You know what would be an insanity of abstraction

In this case, I'm not sure if it's abstraction-insanity as much as having common solutions to common problems. You know what would be an insanity of abstraction? Rolling all that yourself. Given that there are better and worse abstractions, most are not suitable for most use-cases, a lot of times simpler and more centralized is actually more stable. But when you start needing high-availability-coordination you're going to be damn happy that there are things such as Consul, etcd and Zookeeper. As for Salt; by all means, start off by having bash scripts in source control, which at some points becomes a pain-point and you'll realize you need some kind of configuration management to not go insane. Several of these tools are just putting a framework and common language for tasks we have to do either way.