Yes you have that right, the network service in RHEL8 / CentOS 8 / Rocky Linux / Alma Linux no longer exists. So there is no more systemctl restart network
You can restart NetworkManager but it doesn't have the same effect or ifup/ifdown on all interfaces.
Generally if NetworkManager is installed you will want to restart it or it won't apply the settings from ifcfg.
systemctl restart NetworkManager
To repl........