You always have to think about ops, regardless of tooling. I agree that you can have a very nice, reproducible setup with any of those tools though. Personally,

You always have to think about ops, regardless of tooling. I agree that you can have a very nice, reproducible setup with any of those tools though. Personally, I haven't found those alternatives to be significantly easier to use (though I don't have experience with Salt). For me personally, self hosted k3s on Hetzner with FluxCD is the least painful option I've found.