I recently installed Ubuntu 20.04 and configured a home gateway. I had not done something like that in a while (3+ years). My experience was not much different

I recently installed Ubuntu 20.04 and configured a home gateway. I had not done something like that in a while (3+ years). My experience was not much different this time than any other time before as far as I remember. It took me an hour of reading the ubuntu official documentation and a few man pages on systemd, interfaces, networkd, resolvd, netplan etc to figure out how stuff works on this distro. After that I was able to simply do 'systemctl status' and look at all the running processes, then stop and disable all the ones I didn't want. I wanted to run unbound dns as my dnssec verifying, tls-forwarding, blocklist/filtering resolver. I was able to do that without any difficulty – stopped resolvd, enabled and started unbound and changed the entry in resolv.conf. I also brought up dhcpd for my network and was able to serve that dns server to the devices on my network. Then I had to spend a bit of time figuring out pppd, policy routing and nftables to do a bit of fancy dual wan routing and traffic filtering. I found netplan to be quite good at what it does (still incomplete for more advanced scenarios - but then so was all the previous tools similar to this). In all this, I actually found systemd quite helpful. I think those who complain don't take the few minutes it takes to read the man pages and familiarize themselves with the tools on the OS. Ofcourse things change, and you will have to learn new things. Expecting things to stay constant is unrealistic. As long as I'm able to depend on man-pages and official distro documentation, I'm not objecting to change.