I think it would surprise you. A lot of people seem to holdover that opinion from pre-v2, but a lot is well done. Templates are totally doable, heck you can reference exported shell vars in the config directly.
TBH, v1 was already kilometers ahead compared to Apache or nginx for normal, casual users.
I host some stuff at home and moving from nginx to Caddy v1 was a huge breath of fresh air. V2 made the product extremely good.
I tried a bit to use the API to automate my deployments (which are, again, home deployments) but it stopped to make sense when i discovered that Caddy has the ability to read config files via wildcards.