It seems like the real problem is that you've got a ton of drift between your Prod and Dev environments. How old is your Prod compared to your Dev?
Since you're running something in a container, you should be able to upgrade the host OS (more accurately, recreate the hosts with current images) very easily. I wouldn't expect there to be more than a few weeks of drift between Prod and Dev.
Our GCP prod is running google's container optimized os [1], something relatively current? But the container we run our app in is debian something, and my dev environment matches that... But when I go to prod, I don't go into the container, because a) I don't really understand how? b) I don't need to anyway; I can do almost all the stuff that needs doing without getting a shell into the container.
The real problem is that ifconfig can do the job, but nobody wanted to modify it, so they built a new tool, but both tools still work, and nobody is going to cleanse the world of ifconfig. Same deal for netstat vs ss. ss does the same job as netstat, but supposedly faster or better? but they could have made netstat better and didn't. In the meantime, causing churn and leaving a wake of broken documentation and frustrated users.
I didn't pick the environment, it was there, and I don't have enough authority to change the environment that much, I'm just working part time, and I want to get in, do my work, and get out. It sucks having to use two different tools for the same thing, all over the place. If I had an open offer to come work part time with a former boss at a place running FreeBSD and Erlang, I'd have taken it, but I got Linux and Rust instead, so I'm dealing with it :P
Of course, FreeBSD isn't perfect either. I've just updated a machine to FreeBSD 14, to find that I can no longer use the command
ifconfig pfsync vlandev main vlan 4 192.168.4.11/24
because I get an error
ifconfig: both vlan and vlandev must be specified
Instead, I've got to put the vlan number first. So I've got that to chase down, and freebsd-update was also very slow, so I've got that to chase down too.
We run a lot of containerized stuff too, but in AWS EKS. For us, access to the container host isn't really a thing, and I'm not even sure if it's possible to be honest. The container hosts are an implementation detail, any direct access to the containers is through `kubectl exec ...`, so the tools available there come from the container image and match from dev through to prod.
I do agree with you though. It really feels like the change from netstat to ss, ifconfig to ip, etc, is churn for the sake of churn. FreeBSD is nice because it's a comprehensive operating system. Linux is a kernel used by a whole bunch of different, but fairly similar, operating systems.
Since you're running something in a container, you should be able to upgrade the host OS (more accurately, recreate the hosts with current images) very easily. I wouldn't expect there to be more than a few weeks of drift between Prod and Dev.