If something like Ansible is too much, you could list the packages as a bash array in a file

pkgs=(
vim
bash-completion
...
)

Source the file

source pkgs.txt

Then install them

dnf install ${pkgs[@]}

This expands to dnf install vim bash-completion ...

As for listing the installed packages,

dnf repoquery --userinstalled --queryformat '%{name}\n'

The list includes all packages not installed as dependencies, so it's not quite perfect but might be close enough to what you need.

The array expansion workaround should work for other package managers too, as long as they take the list of packages as whitespace-separated arguments.

Take a look at configuration management systems like Puppet or Ansible. There are many ways to have a pre-defined, repeatable system configuration in a text file.

NixOS took that particular aspect too far that I don't think it would become mainstream, especially in desktop environments. But I do agree that package management itself makes sense to do this. requirements.txt/packages.json/etc worked out for most environments, and it wouldn't require much scripting.

Configs certainly change faster than systems, I have to adatp it to hw and tasks every tima. So, pacman -S base-devel