> Alone the Paradigma shift from doing things step by step vs describing what you need and than things happen on it is a game changer.

I've actually used both in conjunction and it was decent: Ansible for managing accounts, directories, installed packages (the stuff you might actually need to run containers and/or an orchestrator), essentially taking care of the "infrastructure" part for on-prem nodes, so that the actual workloads can then be launched as containers.

In that mode of work, there was very little imperative about Ansible, for example:

  - name: Ensure we have a group
    ansible.builtin.group:
      name: somegroup
      gid: 2000
      state: present
  
  - name: Ensure that we have a user that belongs to the group
    ansible.builtin.user:
      name: someuser
      uid: 3000
      shell: /bin/bash
      groups: somegroup
      append: yes
      state: present

This can help you setup some monitoring for the nodes themselves, install updates, mess around with any PKI stuff you need to do and so on, everything that you could achieve either manually or by some Bash scripts running through SSH. Better yet, the people who just want to run the containers won't have to think about any of this, so it ensures separation of concerns as well.

Deploying apps through Ansible directly can work, but most of the container orchestrators might admittedly be better suited for this, if you are okay with containerized workloads. There, they all shine: Docker Swarm, Hashicorp Nomad, Kubernetes (K3s is really great) and so on...