When I first came across Linux you would download the code (very slowly) to /usr/src/linux (extract and cd) and run "make config". You'd answer quite a lot of y/n and later y/n/m questions and then copy a binary and later on run a script to put things in place. Then you would fix up lilo and off you trot ... or not 8)

Is that the Linux way you are on about? No obviously not 8)

I think you mean the "unix idealized but never really happened exactly but we are quite close if you squint a bit ... way" where each tool does one job well and the pipeline takes up the slack.

dhcpd is probably more quirky than dnsmasq, all software from ISC is kinda ass (also technically dhcpd is end of life)