I don’t mean disrespect but I believe you miss a huge part of Infra as Code:
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any device can break at any time, for a critical system (HA is critical to me just like banking systems I design during the day) I want the ability to rebuild quickly, and be sure that I rebuild the same way. Whenever there is a new OS version, new better Hardware, I start my script and go for coffee. Already used twice in one month time.
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things break more often than it should in IT. If something fails, I want to see the history of changes. Where I work we even have a legal requirement to prove any change done to any system, but on top of that it’s super useful to finds introduced bugs, and revert bad configs.
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reproductability, I don’t have this yet, but before changing a production system, it’s nice to toy in test environment to rebuild things better, but when my wife calls me in the middle of my changes, I can’t have a half working HA in production with my alarm, hot water and heating systems down.
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oh and secrets, I come to it, since things are auto-deployed, we don’t just put secrets together with Ansible or Terraform scripts, they all have secret management system, either special encrypted files or a full Vault system. So when I have all config in Git, I would not put the PIN of my alarm on a simple Git in plain text, even if I only use that PIN for that system. Actually, doesn’t even matter if I use different passwords for each service, the hacker would easily get a nice list of all my passwords
You keep coming with the argument “you don’t need that”, well the standard non-IT guy doesn’t, but real ITers need more choice. My point is that HA is leaving behind the ITers behind dropping features. It’s like Linux dropping the command line support for GUI only, “because you don’t need CLI” and we want to support non technical persons who now using Windows or mac.
In the same line of thought I will pretend that you don’t need HA for privacy because Apple HomeKit is already positioning themselves as Privacy conscious, and got banking-grade procedures in place again hacking that no casual users would have home. Even if I believe it I would not use that as an argument. Why? Because I value choice! We live on free countries, noone is making choices for us, that would be as bad as entering my Privacy.