I set up systems in 2009+ that had multiple IPs per phy, bonded, vlan, etc. on linux. I used the config files within the distro (mostly CentOS/RH then) to do this. Worked fine. I developed somewhat better inspection scripting to augment this. My users never had problems with this.

I think the distro tooling used ip under the covers. I didn't care one way or the other. Nor did the users.