That's not necessarily true. There is the raw module that executes a bare command. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/ansible/...

Yeah, but at that point you've lost a lot of the benefits to using ansible.

Ansible uses this module to configure devices where it is impossible to install python, like network devices, which is one of ansible's big strengths.

are there any linux distributions which don't require python installed, other than embedded?

OpenSUSE, Fedora/RHEL, Gentoo, and probably Debian (and derivatives of all of the above) have it by default, but Alpine and Arch don't appear to.

Yes.