Yes! It was so huge in the ISP space back then because trying to run something like NNTP on Linux at the time was just not a great experience for customers. Indy ISPs aren't really a thing these days I guess, but back then it was a really strong market for FreeBSD.
With heavy use in Netflix's CDN resulting in something like more than 15% of internet traffic being delivered by FreeBSD, that's some kind of success I imagine.
If anyone wants to learn (as opposed to arguing), the papers on Netflix's TLS offloading work are a fun read.
And say what you will, something like 20% of all internet traffic has a FreeBSD endpoint. And doing 400Gb/s of encrypted streaming from one box is quite an accomplishment.
I would argue the reason someone like Netflix or any of the other large orgs using FreeBSD come there is for the simplicity/cohesiveness. If you're looking to do something like in-kernel TLS or something, way easier on something smaller, documented, and with an OS devel team that will likely incorporate your work in future releases.
The unsaid thing here is Linux is largely not used by sysadmin/unix types. Devops has driven this bloat so that people new to the field can just not have to learn any fundamentals about the OS they're building their tools on. For rapid "move fast and break things" VC nonsense, this is a great match. For efficiency, correctness, and long-term maintainability and security, it's a nightmare.
Yeah, it's a weird argument. I've used vnet, but rarely need it. I bind my jails to their own IPs and that's that. That has been available from the very early days of jails.
Again, mature, simple and secure, with very few surprises lurking. There's likely fewer lines of code to support all jail functionality than in systemd.
This speaks more to the issues regarding the "made of many little pieces without coordination" spelled out in the linked post than to using simple scripts for service management. Also the idea that you would have pid files scattered all over instead of /var/run seems like the sort of chaos linux spawns.
The *BSD rc systems are robust and rely on a framework that abstracts stuff out, you're never going to be digging in there for a pid file's location.
(not in a snarky way, I want the story!)