For Less and Sass, it's not very annoying because you don't have to write a lot of ruby code. But writting a complete deployment script if you don't know ruby is very hard... I love to be able to use my favorite JS modules in my deploy script, that's why I wrote Shipit.
Shipit can be an Ansible replacement, but there is no command abstraction to Shipit. Shipit is designed to quickly deploy a project on a set of servers not to configure an entire server.
They used in to deploy projects internally, same for Le Monde. Shipit is not designed to Shipit projects over a lot of servers. It's designed to Shipit small projects or even to ship code on hardware (like raspberry).
Shipit is an automation and deployment tool, git hook is just a hook on a git command. You can't run a command on 10 servers in parallel using git hook post-receive.