Hmmm.
Clearly there is a variety of equally viable approaches here, but whether cloning microSD cards requires less effort than using an established provisioning tool like Ansible probably depends on a) your level of familiarity with the tools in question and b) how many different platforms you're targetting and how often you need to change or update configurations.
The beauty of a tool like Ansible is that it requires no special client-side components (it runs over native SSH), it's highly configurable and, once properly set up, can be made 'platform agnostic' to a large extent (at least across Posix platforms). I think it would be difficult to get the same level of flexibility by simply cloning microSD cards, but if you're only targetting a single homogenous hardware platform that may not be an issue.
The downsides of Ansible are that it has something of a learning curve, the documentation isn't always as helpful as it could be, and there is still quite a bit of churn on individual modules.
Horses for courses I guess.