@bug-meister Yeah, I would say the "mechanism" is deprecated too. Getting this mechanism to work, either by using ansible-pull or by some clever scripting during the first boot, requires Ansible to be preinstalled on your VM templates. That just makes your VMs messy and bloated with additional stuff you only use once. Also, managing Ansible versions becomes more complex. If Ansible is installed from distro repositories, you will have all different versions of Ansible across different distros. If you use pip to install Ansible, it can mess up your system if Ansible dependencies are installed on a system level. You can use Python virtual environments to prevent that but requires additional managing.
It's much better and much more practical to have Ansible installed and used from a single place - Control Node. That way you have one place, one OS, one Ansible version to think about. You already have a machine you are accessing your VMs from? Use that as a control node... unless it is Windows?