So after a very long troubleshooting process, I’ve found the solution to my issues, and wanted to mark the post as solved.
I actually learned about my issue in an non-accepted answer of an unrelated post on stackoverflow.
so quite random tbh.
but what he says is true.
I took the “vars:” line out in my group_vars and host_vars files, and it indeed solved my issue.
Thank you Brian for bothering to reply, your effort actually spurred me to begin challenging my assumptions about my setup.
best