Obviously it’s a different OS and possibly isn’t relevant to you but I’ve found solace in OpenBSD (and other BSDs) in the search of “simplicity” of “the old days”.
My only real headache with FreeBSD has been SAMBA. It seems that every major upgrade bjorked the SAMBA user/account DB, and would cause much wailing and gnashing of teeth. So I learned to deal with that.
I now work for a K8s shop, and find myself migrating back into the linux/systemd fold. There's frustration with systemd'isms, and I truly despise the binary logs; but I'm learning.
But what I found was lots of hate and stupid talkin against systemd, that they all hate it and that FreeBSD will "never have this $hit"
I thought to myself, yeah just hate systemd but not able to produce an easy to use and full fledged service manager. The arrogance was staggering, and I stopped my use of freebsd since then, in almost all aspects linux is superior anyhow.
Such a fully featured systemd service is easily done in 6 - 8 lines of configuration.