While I'm not a Chef fanboy, far from it, some of these comments are just not true.

"and does stuff like execute apt for each desired package on each node on each run". No you just need to set it up correctly so that it keeps the timestamp of the latest apt-get update, and does not refresh it within the next x hours.

"not self-hosted". Somewhat agreed, although you can easily get around this with the excellent https://github.com/tobami/littlechef