Both are just abstractions over primatives and services find in the underlying operating system.

Moving to just native of or nftables and running your firewall like a server has been on of my best moves. You will learn a tone more, have a lot more flexibility and overall o think it’s a much better experience.

I am a traditional network engineer as well (learned Juno’s/Cisco/etc). Ansible is a good way to do “commits” and config management.