Is VESA still a thing today ?

I am not talking about the monitor mounting specification but the video driver. I was testing FreeBSD the other day again, I installed it many times without much success on the video department, I always get 'no screen found' and 'unable to connect to x server' sort of thing, and I know it was the display driver problem. I remember twice so far I got FreeBSD desktop running, one was a long time ago with a live CD with KDE preconfigured, the other time was recently on another desktop, this time I can not make it work on a TP notebook. In the 'old days' there was a lot to set up on the X configurator, I can use VESA display if no driver can match the h/w, but the once worked Ghost BSD which has a very simple setup can no longer work on the TP, not even to complete the installation but with a cursor on black screen and halt. I don't know why FreeBSD is so hard to set up the desktop or all BSD are the same, I've no problem at all on all Linux distro I tried, please comment.