The PR wasn't rejected, looks like it was abandoned by the author and otherwise no one seems to care enough about the parent issue.

Anyway, it looks like you pretty much answered your own question.
In general you probably shouldn't care about the output of the commands unless you're debugging some specific issue, in which case "tradeoff" of Ansible actually being verbose is a plus. ;)

Hi! After more than 6 years using Ansible I have not found a way to print the standard output of a program running under the command module, so I'm afraid the only way to achieve this is exactly what you suggest: using a debug task, something that has always seemed terribly ugly to me.