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.