AD is still shockingly robust. For one thing, if you were using "ancient versions of Windows", your experience was different than today. Though FWIW, it's a personal frustration that built-in features of Windows Server have been left to rot on the vine a bit because a lot of the resources Microsoft had working on them got shifted to Azure, because the cloud is a cash printer. There are a lot of modern UI conveniences that on-prem AD doesn't have for no reason other than Microsoft would rather you move to the cloud and pay them monthly per head.

I suspect that if your title was SRE, and they still had some on-prem AD controllers, they were probably not maintained as well as a place who still calls their IT folks SysAdmins, if the titles are any hint on the general focus of tech stacks.