I've repeatedly tried to make Puppet work for "small" installations, be it a single dev laptop, our fleet of default base VMs (before containers were a thing),

I've repeatedly tried to make Puppet work for "small" installations, be it a single dev laptop, our fleet of default base VMs (before containers were a thing), or home use. You couldn't really do anything without community packages, and their update rate was kinda meh. A lot of churn. Puppet always seemed to me like a scalable enterprise solution, but you either need a team to keep it in check, or just never update. I'm not specifically recommending Ansible, but it's what I've been using for a couple years, and I would always recommend that for home use over Puppet. Disclaimer: I last used Puppet in 2017, but for like 7 years extensively before that and everything I mentioned happened several times. Second disclaimer: By now I think parametrizing everything is a huge mistake - the real worth is editing the config in one place and having it in SCM. if you only parametrize 2 lines out of a 100 line config file and basically copy it over with 2x `sed` - that's fine.