If you move daemons from enabled to disabled, then you’ve taken an extra step. The difficulty is not in remembering to do it once, and daemons are a simple example. The difficulty is in always remembering, especially for trickier changes. But sure, if everyone always remembers, then it’s fine :)
I don’t think reversing what you just did is as trivial as it should be. For a git-based workflow to work well, it should be as simple as reverting a commit.
Setting up a VM from scratch is where Ansible is great. A CI/CD that recreates the VM and applies the config would work really well with automatic git deployment, but that’s generally not how people use it.
People have been chanting cattle not pets since before Ansible existed, so if people cargo cult it without using it in the way it's useful, there's not a tool out there that's going to really protect people from lack of due diligence. We don't judge a kitchen knife according to the people who try to grip it by the blade. Dependencies outside of an app's git repo will always exist for anything beyond the most trivial application.
Tooling can assist process, provide guard rails and reminders, but it's never going to replace remembering some important things. Having layers of process that mean that a single person forgetting is not going to cause disaster are necessary no matter what. Maybe when general AI exists we won't have to worry about remembering things, but then at best most of us will be out of jobs, at worst we'll be running from kill bots.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of design decisions in Ansible that regularly annoy me, but I've never expected it to make me less forgetful or substitute for people cooperating and communicating, and I think expecting any tool to do that is a road to disappointment.
I don’t think reversing what you just did is as trivial as it should be. For a git-based workflow to work well, it should be as simple as reverting a commit.
Setting up a VM from scratch is where Ansible is great. A CI/CD that recreates the VM and applies the config would work really well with automatic git deployment, but that’s generally not how people use it.