The general lesson from that seems to be that a simpler, well-understood, well-tested and mostly static attack surface is better than a more complex, more fully-featured and more dynamic attack surface. I wonder whether we'll see a trend towards even more boring Linux distributions which focus on consistency over modernity. I wouldn't complain if we did.
The right comparison is not between a particular BSD and Linux, its between a particular BSD and a Linux distro.
The full range of distros are very different from each other. Consider Void, Alpine, Gentoo, Chimera, NixOS.....
Different C libraries, init systems, different default command line utilities....
Try running a FreeBSD binary under OpenBSD.
While I cannot agree nor disagree on the quality of BSDs (haven't used one in 20 years), I find it funny that in this case a design by committee is proof of quality.
I guess it's better than design by headless chicken which is how the Linux user-space is developed. Personally, I am a big fan of design by dictatorship, where one guy at the top either has a vision or can reject silly features and ideas with strong-enough words (Torvalds, Jobs, etc.) - this is the only way to create a cohesive experience, and honestly if it works for the kernel, there's no reason it shouldn't work in userspace.
I don't think "design" is correct word: organized, managed, or ran perhaps.
> The FreeBSD Project is run by FreeBSD committers, or developers who have direct commit access to the master Git repository.[1] The FreeBSD Core Team exists to provide direction and is responsible for setting goals for the FreeBSD Project and to provide mediation in the event of disputes, and also takes the final decision in case of disagreement between individuals and teams involved in the project.[2]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Core_Team
There is no BDFL, à la Linux or formerly Python: it's a 'board of directors'. Decisions are mostly dispute / policy-focused, and less technical for a particular bit of code.
They decide what gets included in the default distribution, they set the goals and provider sponsorships for achieving them.
So yes, board of directors is probably more fitting.
And then of course you have the people with a commit bit. They can essentially work on whatever they like, but inclusion into the main branch is still up to the core team.
There was a huge debate some years ago when Netgate sponsored development/porting of WireGuard to FreeBSD, and the code was of a poor quality, and was ultimately removed from FreeBSD 13.
Take filesystems, the official filesystems are UFS(1/2) and ZFS. They have GEOM as LVM and LUKS and more.
That being said, the majority of money and development goes into Linux, which by itself may make it a better system (eventually).
Edit: Of course UFS is not deprecated.