Exactly. The reason why I'm a fan of the BSDs in general is because of the cohesion of the base system, not to mention the high quality of its documentation and source code. I tend to prefer cleaner, cohesive systems that seem "designed" (System 7 Unix, the BSDs, Plan 9, C, NeXT and early Mac OS X, Smalltalk, many functional programming languages like Scheme and Standard ML) to large, complex systems that seem "evolved" (Windows, Linux, C++, JavaScript, the Web in general). I also like the conservative, deliberate approach that the BSDs take when it comes to the inclusion of new features. I remember reading a FreeBSD guide about 20 years ago that said something to the effect of "BSD is what you get when Unix hackers make a Unix for a PC, while Linux is what you get when PC hackers make a Unix for a PC." The spirit of that quote is that the BSDs tend to adhere to the Unix philosophy and thus their feature additions are in line with the philosophy of the overall system. The consequence of this, though, is that the BSDs are slower to adopt new technologies compared to Linux, though there is, in my opinion, a tendency in the Linux ecosystem for new technologies to be pushed before they are 100% ready, and the Linux ecosystem, as you said, feels more like an assembly of parts, each with their own design philosophies, rather than a cohesive system. Linux is certainly good, but I personally find FreeBSD more pleasant.
With that said, I use FreeBSD for my home server and also inside VMs, but I find myself using Linux more. There are many situations where I often need to use Linux instead of FreeBSD due to either software compatibility reasons or lack of drivers.