What is the purpose and support scope of the ansible-core package shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9?

It is an RPM in the RHEL 9 AppStream repository, meant to run automation that Red Hat products provide or generate. Only that content is supported, not arbitrary modules or your own playbooks.

• Package: ansible-core, installed with dnf from the AppStream repository.
• Purpose: run automation code provided or generated by Red Hat.
• Supported: playbooks, roles and modules included in or generated by a Red Hat product, for example:
  • the system roles in the rhel-system-roles package,
  • Red Hat Insights remediation playbooks,
  • OpenSCAP compliance playbooks.
• Not supported: the other modules and plugins that come with ansible-core.

So the package is there so RHEL's own tooling works out of the box. For general-purpose, supported automation Red Hat sells the Ansible Automation Platform.

Go deeper:

• Scope of support for the Ansible Core package in RHEL 9 and 8.6+ AppStream (Red Hat) — the authoritative statement: only content included with or generated by Red Hat products.
• Automating system administration by using RHEL system roles (Red Hat docs) — the main supported content that package exists to run.