Not really. It can all be faked. Virtual Directory Servers are a thing. Live javascript transformation of data from a non MS LDAP server, functioning as AD. Just match up the schema, and go. You get real multi master replication (no idea if MS has this now, but they didn’t at the time) and an actually performant server. Plus all the logs just pipe over to your syslog server so you don’t have to rdp into a server and look at event viewer. It can all be done from the shell on the jump server you use to manage everything else.

AD is just LDAP with extra steps.