Unbreakably stable, cohesive (no need to fit and manage tens of different pieces to get a get a functionning OS), performant, bhyve, BSD licensed (can be a pro or con tho). It has quite a lot of stuff that makes it worthy of Linux or other BSDs.
Not to mention that generations of Playstation and Nintendo consoles run on top of their work, and Apple's macOS also has deep roots into the BSD history
There's an old saying: "Linux users use Linux because they hate Windows. BSD users use BSD because they love Unix." Obviously this is not true for every individual user, but I think it describes a trend or pattern.
FreeBSD is the tool you don't know you need, and then suddenly there's the perfect use case, because those BSD alchemists never get tired of tinkering on it and suddenly BSD overtake Linux or Windows in some areas. You think Linux is everywhere, same with BSD its just better at hiding.
The NAS community seems to have standardized on BSD for reasons outside of my understanding. If you're looking to roll your own NAS you might end up with BSD rather than Linux.
ZFS is baked in by default and the os is rock solid stable. It follows the same philosophy as Debian really, only the most tried and tested code makes it into the os.
Haha yeah actually I wonder whether people actually did ask this when Linux started making the rounds. If I read the history right BSD was already almost 15 years old at the time!
It was, but there wasn't an i386 BSD yet (which is where OpenBSD and NetBSD enter the picture). Linus Torvalds has said if OpenBSD had been available when he started the linux kernal, he would have just used that instead