You shouldn’t have a compiler on your webserver at all, and building a kernel should happen on a different machine than installing it. (And why isn’t the official kernel good enough?)
Beyond the security surface that’s just asking to brick the machine; if you never make any mistakes it’s because you never tried anything very interesting with it in the first place.
Furthermore, I claim that “you can write a script to edit /etc” is not how an OS should support configuration. Instead of being possible to keep a copy of the config in a script somewhere else, it should be impossible to do anything but that. So basically /etc and UNIX are bad ‘cause they’re not declarative.
