Hi,
We decided to continue using the (old) slapd.conf file, and rely on our openldap MMR-cluster to keep the LDAP service up, while individual servers are restarted.
Since the our 2.5 MMR setup is behind a load balancer, clients don't notice individual backend servers going down and coming up again.
We just love the simplicity of the config file(and various includes that we do) and also like the inline comments.
We configure ldap through ansible scripts.