Yes, the article is very old. > Wow, so painful. And also something that hasn't been true for ages. By way of anecdote, I've had to do config merges on major

Yes, the article is very old. > Wow, so painful. And also something that hasn't been true for ages. By way of anecdote, I've had to do config merges on major version upgrades more on Debian systems than FreeBSD systems, but even then the difference hasn't been all that great: major version upgrades just work. And the last time I had to build a custom kernel was FreeBSD 6, which was about a decade ago. Any remaining pain is largely a consequence of the freebsd-update works and should mostly go away once the base system is packaged (which should also make security updates a little faster to install).