Nuance is very important. When one speaks, sometimes they ignore the nuance of the other side. Therefore, they never get to truly know the other side, and true harmony can never be achieved. Sometimes, those who claim or imply to be nuanced, are the very ones who are the least nuanced. If one side is pushed into a corner, they will fight back, hard.
If you are willing to abandon Linux, I would suggest FreeBSD for general purpose servers.
It is a full operating system, which starts you off with a CLI, that is easy to configure. There is a full handbook that describes the full process, and it is on their website. FreeBSD is an operating system, rather than a distribution of cobbled together packages. Due to this, operating system binaries, and package binaries, are separated. This makes configuration on the OS level consistent.
A lot of Linux programs come from the BSD family. FreeBSD also has its own hypervisor, named Bhyve. FreeBSD has its own version of Docker as well, they are called jails. It might take some time to learn, but I promise it will be worth the time.