It's funny you can get completely silo'd in your career, thinking you've seen it all. SBS 2008 is a really surprising little offering, lots of the admin tools seem streets ahead of anything I'd seen out of Microsoft on the enterprise editions, even if only that they point out problems and have actual links that work to send you in the right direction to solve them.
In some ways it reminds me a lot of the problems I used to have with some small customers when I first started my career and was dealing with small business owners who didn't want to learn how to be system administrators.
It might not be cool, but it's still fascinating.
edit: It is also surprisingly snappy on some fairly average hardware and running in a VM. Not sure what Microsoft have done between 2008 and 2019 but none of it was adding to the performance.
That and Windows NAS were some interesting versions and ways to get around CAL pricing.