I feel you on the YAML, the configurations I have in Neovim that I load (as a separate config from my default) just for contending with YAML are a bit gnarly. And, the linting tools for YAML, or the particular dialect of a specific thing in YAML are not uniform at all.

Some tell me that Ansible is supposed to be better, I still prefer doing these things in Salt, in the yet rarer and rarer occasion something is not being run in some form or another of "distroless" container.