I appreciated learning what's involved, though.

Not necessarily. For one, the BSD has, or at least used to have much worse driver support for wireless adapters. With a regular server/desktop Linux distro, it's also easier to run other services on the same device. For example, nothing prevents you from running nginx and hosting a website, or a personal email server.

In this day and age, if that's what you're after, you can just point an AI at the problem and give it shell access, and it'll just do what you describe (Claude code, codex, etc).