Is it better than sliced bread, no. But it does some things better than other systems.
First, it feels small enough that I understand what’s going on while still providing valuable services out of the box - a web server, load balancer/proxy, etc.
But more importantly the pieces all play together to make a unified system: the load balancer can do layer 3 by interacting with the system firewall, httpd works with the built in ACME client for TLS. All those pieces benefit from being part of the system as a whole, by having very consistent tooling and support - things are named very consistently and share flags across the system, and are backed by very high quality manpages.
Simply put it’s not perfect, nor revolutionary, but it gets a lot of things right.
First, it feels small enough that I understand what’s going on while still providing valuable services out of the box - a web server, load balancer/proxy, etc.
But more importantly the pieces all play together to make a unified system: the load balancer can do layer 3 by interacting with the system firewall, httpd works with the built in ACME client for TLS. All those pieces benefit from being part of the system as a whole, by having very consistent tooling and support - things are named very consistently and share flags across the system, and are backed by very high quality manpages.
Simply put it’s not perfect, nor revolutionary, but it gets a lot of things right.