What complaining.
There weren't paved paths before. Whatever one person learned was different from how anyone else did it. Few of the tools had anywhere near the essential capabilities, serving o ly some tiny niche of the use cases in some tool specific limited way.
Look at all the different netsevs supported by systemd-networkd. https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst... This is a huge list of tools that required a huge assortment of tools to do before, few of which had even part way decent management & fewer still had good init scripts. You used to have to learn from 0 each time, with each tool. Nothing was alike, nothing was as capable, nothing was integrative.
Don't listen to these complainers, for God sake. Your life is too short to get pissed off about well built work together featureful tools being built in a mono-repo fashion.
I'm so tired of the sabotage, so tired of broadscale general refusenik attitudes. This post is absurd. There was nothing to learn before, everything was 100% special snowflake & distinct. None of it was great, all of it was limited. Systemd mono-repo is built of many small pieces, but they couple together and are 100x more learnable. What you learn today will work across whatever system you run across. It's such a a better world, and these "pry it from my cold dead fingers" attitude can keep to that path for all I care, but I wish they weren't poisoning kinds with absurd incorrect negativity & being such magnets for disdain. The world today is fantastic & you rarely see these folks with even an iota of appreciation for how good we have it, never a drop of balance. But hate sells, & unites, powerfully.