To add my two cents:
I also deploy OpenHAB via ansible, by plopping down my textual config files and spinning up a docker image pointing at them. This is very beneficial both for reproducibility and for change management.
I currently configure ZWave device and Lifx bulb items without any difficulty at all via textual config. Extremely easy. The “things” are mostly automatic once the bindings are installed, and thus my items definitions simply refer to the channel=“lifx:colorlight:MAC_ADDR:CHANNEL”, or channel=“zwave:device:controller:nodeX:CHANNEL”, and all items are matched to their things perfectly easily.
I’d love to be able to drop the “pages” into a folder as .yaml files and have them loaded. I’d love to know what the reasoning behind not providing this is at least, maybe there’s just some issues that can be worked through?