One thing I’ve never understood is how network-manager relates to all this brokenness: on every single Linux distribution I’ve run, I’ve had to hack around network-manager to avoid random broken stuff. Similarly, whatever was wrong with ifconfig and friends? ip might be “better”, but its documentation has been horrible and it obsoletes my 20 or so years of experience with Linux networking for no real gains

Correct. And there are other people working on those projects too, even if we assume Lennart is that good. I found a fairly trivial DoS issue in systemd-resolved in ~10min with a fuzzer. (Years ago, fixed already) That shouldn't happen in a system obsessed with correctness.

I can’t understand why ini format for config files, cant use sed easy... :(