Yes these distros are all about making thing that were easy into complex, “locked down”, “inflexible”, bullshit to justify jobs and payed tech stacks / some property solution existence.
We had Ansible, containers, ZFS and BTRFS that provided all the required immutability needed already but someone decided that is is time to transform regular machines into MIPS-style shitty devices that have a read-only OSes and a separate partition for configs. All in the hopes of eventually selling some orchestration and/or other proprietary repository / platform / BS like Docker / Kubernetes does.