This disables cowsay messages.
Enables persistent connections, so that multiple playbooks can reuse the connection.
Enables pipelining for speed, since we are not affected by the limitation described in https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/reference_appendices/config.html#envvar-ANSIBLE_PIPELINING
this gives us some speed boost.
Additionally the playbook dir was set, so that some commands can benefit from the correct default.
This fixes the warnings for the sftp transfer mechanism failing, when sftp is disabled on all hosts using the ssh hardening role.
This should usually be covered with the scp_if_ssh option but it seems like this option is ignored on newer Ansible versions. Which sadly was not mentioned in any changelog :(