I'm aware of the implications concerning the history, but sorry, the machine park is two machines. Setting up vault would just be total overkill. The people that have access to that repo change like once every few years. The repo will never go public. Let's keep the solution at least somewhat tailored to the problem.
Hey, I'm not arguing one way or the other. I like using Ansible for configuration in the way I work. I can trust that I can show my best friend and my worst enemy my project and they won't have the capability of making my life hell. Rock on though. Use the simplest solution for the problem at hand. If you're just managing two boxes though, I'd have a hard time coming up with an argument for adding more complexity to the setup to essentially make it unchanged.
It's all chef-based so we could be using encrypted databags, but as anybody with access to the repo has root on the machines anyways, there's little to gain there as well, especially given the very limited security implications. I'd be more worried that somebody adds his account to the sudoers list that stealing the secret data. But hey, things were that way when I joined and there's better places to spend my time to improve security.