It does, there’s a lot of features and UI added on top of it because it’s primarily an enterprise-oriented service and large companies tend to have a lot more complex usage scenarios than self-hosters.

Headscale is a FOSS reimplementation from scratch of some of the Tailscale proprietary features. It’s inteded as a fallback option for Tailscale users in case the Tailscale service ever enshittifies, and also as a canary for ongoing verification of the Tailscale claim that the client plane functionality is entirely FOSS and above-board.

Speaking of which, Tailscale today is a great example of a company using FOSS well. They are able to provide commercial services and have proprietary code while at the same time opening the client-facing code so users can see for themselves their privacy is cryptographically proven. They also cooperate very well with Headscale and provide a generous gratis service tier.