The only part that is wrong TMK is the “indivisible” one; and perhaps the last item because I recall that PulseAudio and Wayland were pushed this way worse than systemd was.

Because it was not always the case that sysvinit was supported - things were sorta “accidentally hazy” for a while. There was a time (I think during Debian 9 and 10) that systemd not only was the default, but was also enforcedly linked against a large part of the stack (you couldn’t have a desktop environment, PulseAudio or NetworkManager without systemd, for example).

This led to the rise of projects like Devuan, that provide a working system that installs without systemd by default; Antix’s nosystemd repo, which allows to install components of the Debian stack without the enforced systemd dependency; and later libam-elogind-compat which aided shimming some of systemd’s requirements under elogind.

Nowadays at least, the only hard part of not using systemd in Debian is 1.- switching (from or to) seems to require rescue mode and 2.- you lose some of the container management goodies (for eg.: Podman services).

None. On Alpine you can only use OpenRC and on Debian you can only use systemd. Most distros don’t let you change out the init system. If you want systemdless Debian look into Devuan.

Fake news. On Debian you can use both sysvinit and openrc (I have six servers on sysvinit, tho I do actually intend to shift them to systemd later mostly because of the container management goodies).

Judging from this post, I would say you should not be looking to change out your init system

Mostly agreeing here. For selfhosting the init system matters barely any, since past the default distro setup one would be doing most of everything with Docker, Podman, etc. At that point, none of the usual Linux religious wars matter much (you can perfectl edit a compose file with nano).

But that would imply that Python is faster than the one in this comic!

This can’t be C++. Not enough stacks of unneeded template names, and the function names are not mangled beyond recognition.