I have a homelab that is mostly pets (one or two servers that do a job, e.g. one DNS server, one VPN server), and I absolutely spend my time mucking about with Ansible to set them up. But it's awesome when I need to upgrade a server to a new OS version and I can just delete the entire VM and re-configure from scratch relatively fearlessly. Before my silly HaC (Homelab as Code) kick, it wasn't a huge deal to rebuild a server during an afternoon, reference docs and old notes, etc., but I prefer it this way.

Also Ansible is incredibly useful at my work and there's a very large overlap. Which is obviously the main motivation.