I hated Jenkins on first sight but loved Teamcity. Its model is exactly how I imagined an ideal CI system to work. We use it in a minimal way though - a common

I hated Jenkins on first sight but loved Teamcity. Its model is exactly how I imagined an ideal CI system to work. We use it in a minimal way though - a common git+ssh+make workflow that gets inherited to all project builds with only 3 params set in case a default doesn't work. So, I think it's about mental model as you wrote, plus where your techstack is in terms of unification (containerization helps there tremendously).