8 years ago or so I had a job that necessitated doing a bunch of LDAP integrations and I tried FreeIPA, openLDAP and others. It was such a pain. OpenLDAP (slapd) was actually configured using... LDAP. Yes, you configured an LDAP server using it's own protocol. It was not good. My fading impression of FreeIPA is that it had some nice things going for it, but it wasn't nearly as lightweight or friendly towards automation, it felt more like setting up a windows domain controller and clicking through a webUI to set things up.
inejge|11 days ago
It's still possible to configure OpenLDAP via the slapd.conf file. The old roadmap called for ditching configuration file support in 2.5 IIRC, but it proved hugely unpopular so the file works to this day. The new configuration style is mainly useful for live updating of access rules and indexing.