I really desperately want to agree with this at an emotional or aesthetic level - I ran NetBSD on my laptop for the largest portion of my teenage years, using FreeBSD on an old poweredge server for all my "needs a ton of RAM" programs. I had been on this quest to "truly understand" computers/OSes since prepubescence, and BSD appealed to me for exactly the reasons you describe - the pieces just seemed to fit together better.
I've gone deep down this rabbit hole, but now in my mid 20s, it seems like it's all sentimental - the amount of time I interact with any base system is pretty low, Linux's device model seems better suited to modern systems than BSD's more static kernel configs inherited from PDP-11/VAX/VMEbus-esque systems, and probably more than anything else, it's almost always easier to get your software to run on Linux. And after thinking about it, isn't that really the purpose of an OS? To facilitate running and developing software?
I still love running NetBSD on my 90s SPARC laptop, with device drivers descendant from the original 4.4BSD from UCB. I've gone so far as to patch my local install to get the crappy mu-law audio output working so I could playback youtube videos on it for kicks and giggles (recent releases overhauled the audio driver backend and the AMD7930's driver doesn't release some mutexes, failing asserts and hard faults the kernel)
Sometimes the Cathedral isn't so nice though. I never really figured out where I could send the ~5 line patch for this, only where I could submit a bug report, and possibly start a dialogue on the mailing list where I could maybe suggest the fix, and then a NetBSD developer could go fix it themselves? Didn't think it was worth the effort, so I never patched it.
Meanwhile, on Linux, I got a one line patch into the kernel, fixing a presumption that all 32-bit processes are big endian on PowerPC, thereby allowing the development of a 32-bit LE userland. Almost certainly useless to anyone, but it was a bug fix, and the patch process was fairly painless.
I think the end result is that Linux is fast and messy and a little ugly, but most of my hardware and software is also ugly and messy. I could run BSD on my laptop nowadays, but the only day-to-day change to my display server running firefox and $TERM windows would be a hotter keyboard and a few cents added to my energy bill, since those kernels don't really vibe with Intel p-states or whatever it's called now. My userland environment and day to day life is basically identical, just a few added problems when some piece of software assumes I'm on Linux and breaks.
Well, that and OOM handling. I don't ever remember the BSDs locking up quite like Linux does when it runs out of memory (or thrashes swap).
This turned out more rambly than I intended, but oh well. While I'm ranting, why is OpenBSD's fdisk the only implementation of fdisk with a command mode where quitting automatically saves changes*, as opposed to util-linux's fdisk, and NetBSD/FreeBSD's fdisk which always prompt? :-)