FYI, you can eliminate "initrd" altogether by building the necessary drivers directly into the kernel image. Let "initrd" discover the driver modules that will work, then build a kernel. No more need for "initrd" at all.
Many years ago, I amused myself by trying to see how fast my computer – which ran Gentoo – could go from power-off to ready-to-use (with a GUI). On a pokey-slow computer
(originally sold with Windows 95), I got it down to slightly under six seconds. And this is one of the things that I did. All of a sudden, this "pokey-slow" computer wasn't pokey any more.
It "rests in pieces" today, but I got a lot of useful work out of it and I still have the hard drive.
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"systemd" isn't going to go away, and one of the main reasons why not is
remote management. This is something that Microsoft Windows has always excelled at: you need to run hundreds of computers at the same time and to manage them all from one place. Linux had gotten a bad rap as being difficult to run in such an environment. So, someone stepped back and re-imagined how all of this could work
consistently. I think they came up with a very respectable design, given the many constraints.
