If they don't have the problems that other people are having...maybe they don't need that complexity. Different use cases can use different solutions.

An Army unit crossing rocky and muddy terrain might want tracked vehicles and tanks. I don't need that in a vehicle I drive 10 minutes to the office in the city.

This. I can see the utility of systemd and probably would have liked to have it when my team was riding herd on a DC full of Sun E15Ks and HP Superdomes. But for basically everything else that I use Linux for, every time someone says "systemd does this", at least 50% of the time I don't need that, and most of the rest I could do with with other tools with vastly less complexity.

Those jenga towers were terrible, many didn't work very well. Very few had good monitoring, ops, reliability, least-privleges.

It's unbelievable to me to hear people advocating for not having good broadly usable systems, to advocate that sysadmins really should spent their time and energy building bespoke custom cut weird poorly invested in little things to suit their own fancies. It's not helping the company to do this. And to me it's such a weird antisocial vibe, that is radically vocal, that shows up all the time to proclaim everyone everyone else is doing the wrong thing by working together and making tools that fit together, have cohesion. Theres never any suggestions for how or what that looks like either, just the image of not working with others is the only thing presented to sell itself. This is din. This is havoc. This is hell. Don't do it people. And alas, we have to endure this attitude every single time. The forces against cooperation are doggedly persistent and vocal. The forces for just build your own thing, this unreasonableness, is radically overrepresented.

This is why I was so hopeful this submission was going to be a nice new post kind of re-selling where we are today with systemd. Because the pro-social forces are weirdly not bothering to get the social / cultural victory. And those driving us apart telling us to each do our own thing, figure it all out yourself: they are endemic, dime a dozen on social media.

Analogies only go so far. Driving an actual tank with a cannon to the grocery store 10 minutes away is ludicrous, but my smartphone has gigabytes of both ram and storage and a CPU that runs at gigahertz frequency, but weighs about the same as a dumb phone that does far less. It's not the 1970's anymore. We can be inefficient and stop counting every single little bit where it doesn't count. Yes, where it counts, we still want to be efficient and mean and lean, like in transcoding, but for starting up services on a laptop with gobs of ram and CPU cycles to spare, the added expense of the tracked vehicle to the grocery store is what, an extra 100 milliseconds of loading data from nvme storage to RAM? Yeah, don't port kubernetes to a microcontroller. Focus on the interface you have with it and let the complexity just sit there, being harmless.