After becoming significantly interested years ago (before it had systemd) because of KISS philosophy, I've tried Arch, but to me, systemd violates KISS. If you use Arch or forks without systemd, what's your recommendation: hack Arch yourself (if still possible,) or use an Artix, Obarun, and/or Spark, etc. distribution (distro)?

Forks are going to be the easiest route unless you plan on maintaining a few programs on your own...

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Why not use one of the existing forks such as Artix, Obarun (and possibly one or two more)?

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Spark seems to be unmaintained, if someone knows more let us know.
There is also hyperbola (libre extreme) and parabola. Hyperbola seems to be departing Linux for openbsd because of the kernel issues??
Artix and Obarun seem to be the most active alternatives, with artix being essentially a patched up Arch with an init alternative(s). By using elogind (a piece of systemd) and a fake systemd library they run everything that runs on arch.
Obarun provides 100% s6 and its own 66 service supervision suite, no elogind and no libsystemd. Some packages are rebuilt, the rest if they are too intertwined with systemd they stay out (like gnome and cinnamon DE). Except for poweroff, shutdown, halt, reboot, there is not much you can do to bring an Obarun system down or crash.

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