My own early sysadmin experience was with Ubuntu eBox and I hated it. Because none of the expected configuration files or commands you would find on Stackoverflow would work on a eBox managed server. You would do configuration through the UI or nothing.

The debugging was also impossible, because logs were not in the expected places and standard grep on log and conf files would give you nothing.

Cockpit is way better than that. Partially because of systemd, but also dbus and other relatively new APIs in the Linux plumbing layer, which finally allowed us to implement consistent and stateless management UI of a system.

Trigger warning. This is taking me back to when I ran my own "web hosting provider" on a PIII with 128mb of ram back in the early 2000s (I was 13).

Late 1900s :( I still have to deal with CPanel as I have friends hosting their sites on GoDaddy which uses it extensively in 2026...

Came here to say this too.