If people were good about doing it by hand and keeping track of what was done to the box, and ensuring that changes only happen via the documented pipeline, then we wouldn't have a cottage industry of configuration management tools. Maybe you are an outlier and are able to keep good notes, but I think its obvious that the general population is not diligent enough.
Well I use nix so its tracked in git and I can mostly rely on data-only backups then. It makes it so much easier to have multiple laptops (e.g. I have a "completely personal" and "contract work" laptop which have a lot of overlap but are not the same).
> It makes it so much easier to have multiple laptops
You're getting away from having a pet then.
And once you consider that you might have a third laptop for something work related and be able to duplicate the base configuration then you no longer have pets and you just need configuration management.
That isn't even the common use case of most IT professionals, much less most laptop users.
