Yeah, give borg a look. It's just faster to back up, faster to delete old backups, and just easier to do restores because so long as you have the appropriate credentials you can list the archive from any machine.
I think there's still a place/use for --link-dst and hardlinks, but as a backup system I think borg does it better.
I did the same thing, but with a more detailed writeup, in 2009: https://nuxx.net/blog/2009/12/06/time-machine-for-freebsd/
It was really handy, but I now use borg as it just works better.