I would like to default to debian 12 if I have to start fresh.
The Ganeti Cluster was installed on Debian 10 then when 11 launched, I upgraded it. It’s a 10 nodes cluster and I just don’t have time to upgrade it yet. The last update to 11 took me a week to troubleshoot.
Using ansible will help you on your 2nd, 3rd , nth install.
But getting ansible to do what you want (plus testing) for the first time would takes 10x longer than manual install.
I think there’s xkcd about that.