I haven't worked in Infrastructure teams since 2016. At that point I worked with migrating CFEngine to Ansible/Puppet/Saltstack, all of which seem to still be alive (although Puppet less so).
Has configuration management really died out since then? Seems like nothing new is happening, outside of VMWare acquiring Saltstack and fully open-sourcing it under Salt Project.
Any news?
But most people these days (bar some exceptional special cases) are doing immutable infrastructure with homegeneous builds (usually in the cloud, or on some kind of virtualisation infrastructure).
For example, building k8s nodes might be done with Packer and Terraform these days, rather than Ansible/Puppet/Saltstack. These hosts are designed to be largely (if not completely) identical, so configuration management at the host level becomes more about images and less about post-build configuration management.
What used to live in host-oriented config management, therefore, is now pushed up the stack into containers (which are built in container pipelines) and managed at this level of abstraction. Think walls of k8s yaml, or docker compose files, or similar.
This is for cases where servers actually need to be managed, but even this is becoming rarer with the advent of serverless and managed services (in, say, AWS, for example) where you, as the user of the service, doesn't get to log into the host providing the service.