I work with Linux every day – and I have to install plenty of things there as well to make it do what I need it to do. Fortunately in both cases, there are mature package managers to make it super easy to install what I need.

It sounds like the engineers at your company were stuck in their old mindset of using GUIs to administrate everything. You do not need a GUI to administrate Windows Server, and ought to not install the UI components in Windows Server at all unless you’re operating a terminal server for a thin client or something. Of course they’ll find it better when switching from a GUI to the command line, but they could have done that a long time ago while staying on Windows.

Powershell is even more capable of remote administration than bash+SSH is. You can manipulate multiple remote connections at once and use DSC or other built-in workflow tools to deploy changes to thousands of machines with a simple script.

If you would take the time to learn Powershell well, you would come to appreciate the advantages of an object-based shell over the traditional text-and-binary shells.