Any updates on authenticating against Active Directory?

Hi, I am configuring a Freeradius server on Ubuntu 20.04 to authenticate against an Active Directory Domain. I searched online and found many documentation pages, like this one: http://deployingradius.com/documents/configuration/active_directory.html but I did not find any recently produced page, every page that I found dates back to 5+ years ago and relies on Samba and ntlm_auth command. So my question is: is this procedure still recommended? Or are there any newer procedures? Can't I query AD domain as an LDAP server, avoiding joining my Ubuntu server to the domain?