You are definitely wrong. No daemons have to be running, ping operates using standard ICMP echo messages that are a part of any complete IP stack. Any meaningful OS will respond to pings unless prevented from receiving them by a firewall. It wouldn't surprise me to find that some embedded implementations skip that part for size reasons, but even in that category most devices I have available to me still respond. It's a basic network connectivity diagnostic tool.
What is unfortunately common though is people blocking ICMP at their firewall, either at the host level itself or further upstream. Sometimes they just block echo requests, but often they block ICMP entirely which breaks things in very weird ways from time to time.
Blocking ICMP in any way is generally to be considered harmful. It's not 1997 anymore, the "ping of death" is not a thing on any OS you should actually be connecting to the internet.
What is unfortunately common though is people blocking ICMP at their firewall, either at the host level itself or further upstream. Sometimes they just block echo requests, but often they block ICMP entirely which breaks things in very weird ways from time to time.
Blocking ICMP in any way is generally to be considered harmful. It's not 1997 anymore, the "ping of death" is not a thing on any OS you should actually be connecting to the internet.