There are narrow things for which FreeBSD is just lovely but it hasn’t been as powerful as Linux for decades. It was one of the best server OS back in the 1990s though. Just a very clean implementation. I used it a lot back in the day and am very fond of it. But I can no longer recommend it.
Linux added differentiated support for high-scale and high-performance systems pretty early on. Good support for very high core counts, kernel bypass mechanisms, XFS, and more recently things like io_uring. This opened Linux up to a class of high-end applications that FreeBSD wasn't designed for.
FreeBSD was excellent for ordinary UNIX-y server things. If you were designing a high-end database engine though, where you mostly just need the OS to get out of the way, it was much easier to target Linux.
