You get the nice stuff that Ansible brings, like adding specific lines to .zshrc, templates, etc. I found it easier than my usually-beloved shell scripts because I didn't need to think about the mechanism, just the result.

For example, brew install coreutils would use the community.general.homebrew module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... <-- you can see from that page that each module has lots of examples, which makes it pretty easy to go from requirements to Ansible script.