I miss the days when I didn't have to worry about outside programs changing my configs without my knowledge.
There is nothing wrong with that but it shouldn't be conflated as choice and paraded as success of such.
There are distributions (e.g. Linux from Scratch) for when the option you want is the NULL option—i.e., doing things yourself. But there are N other managed options, not just one managed option and NULL.
Unfortunately strawman distro is never real and the problems still exist after congratulating the ability to switch to it.
Standard practice for me was to rip out every last shred of NetworkManager on every fresh build, but I didn't realize how many other utilities broke the resolver config as well.
To be fair, in that particular config, resolv.conf never changes as it always points to loopback, with your preferred nameservers only existing in memory in unbound, and in network manager's config.
It's opaque and hard to debug. It may have utility on laptops, but on servers, it is absolutely counterproductive. I could not for the life of me figure out what it was doing w.r.t ipv6 prefix delegation and how it was dealing with dhclient6 internally. My leases would expire but not renew. Eventually, I had to rip it out and create simple configs by hand that work well.
I'll also agree that the benefits on a server are next to non-existant, but at the same time it's just a default that's trivial to turn off, and I could probably count on one hand the number of times it's bitten me while building and deploying tens of thousands of hosts over the last 15 years.
It's a tool I've learned to love on my workstations, and rarely even notice on production systems.
If you're on a RH or Arch derived distro, policy is just the opposite, and if the service is ever magically enabled (aside from Anaconda enabling it after the package was selected at install time), it's a massive bug (I can't find any such bug report in Arch or Fedora).
Not understanding the difference between these is likely part of the problem here.
When something is regularly found to be the problem, and has never made my life any easier, it gets yanked. Sometimes I may have had time to analyze further, other times it may have been an emergency. Regardless, it's been at least 1.5 years since I worked in that environment, and my memory has faded. In the real world, we don't have infinite time to analyze infinite failures.
Here's what I remember:
NetworkManager = problems.
No NetworkManager = no problems.
You may care to look down on people who don't always have the time to analyze every single occurrence of every single problem to the nth degree, and subsequently catalogue the exact cause and fix for reference when posting on forums in the future, and that's fine.
My opinion is, it sucks, and I don't want it.
If you like it, and enjoy its benefits, please do. I'm not denigrating you for your choice.
Lovely. I have between one and two machines that need this. I have 1289 machines that don't.
When I'm on a DHCP network dhclient runs and manages my resolv.conf as expected.
We're still entirely in control in GNU/Linux, if you assert control. It turns out however that most people actually want the distros to do all the magic and for things to Just Work.