ansible just runs commands over ssh. can’t get more simple.

Except it is bloated and slow, and primarily only maintained by Red Hat where they don't fix bugs for extended periods of time. Their loops and register methods are extremely slow taking 30 seconds to delete a group of files and folders which only takes a second in Bash.

Also the deployments decay and break over time

Very true. I really wish Terraform would have attempted to solve automation on the scale of Ansible, or another organization would have committed to a replacement in Go or Rust. Unfortunately Ansible is still the best that we have currently.