Any updates on authenticating against Active Directory?

[egobrc at gmail.com]

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?