[diffeomorphism]

grub with timeout 0 achieves the same visual effect, but sometimes you need debugging (windows also has "boot into safemode, android has recovery etc.).

There are many bootloaders you could choose from efistub (which you mention), gummiboot, refind ... . Having one with a user visible interface is useful if you either dualboot or want to expose things like previous kernels or filesystem snapshots.

> So the idea would be

Sure you could do that, or you could set grub timeout to zero if multi booting, larger timeout if not and present the same familiar interface no matter whether you use UEFI or BIOS.

[Nextgrid]

My argument was less about the visual impact and more about having yet another moving part. A timeout of zero doesn’t magically solve the complexity of its configuration or failure modes.