Systemd has always rubbed me the wrong way, and its uptake across all the base distros turns me off, but at least...

https://nosystemd.org/

There are still distros without it, I may have to go to one, since I already jumped Win10 to Cachy for the BS MS is pulling. I was going to go systemd-free but Cachy "just worked" compared to the others in terms of setup. So I stuck with it.

I wish Lennart would just stop already.

Yeah it's one of the reasons I run BSD. I don't want stuff changing that works well. And I don't want big tech suits telling me what's good for me.

BSD is much less invested in chasing the next big thing, and also has much less contributions from big tech. Which for me are both pluses. Of course I respect those who differ but they have Linux.

And when I see what Poettering is working on now with ammutable I'm even more glad I'm not on that train.

Your link's not loading for me, but I can recommend Guix System to anyone looking for a systemd-free distro similar to NixOS. For something Arch-like, there's Void (but beware it is not actually based on Arch, so no AUR or pacman).