[md8z]

I don't understand why this philosophy discussion seems to get brought up so frequently or why anyone needs to care about philosophy in the context of a computer program. Linux distributions that adopted it are not sitting around pondering the meaning of life or the existential nature of what it means to boot a computer, they were using it to solve a real problem that they had. It was a complex problem, it was not a simple problem that could have been solved with a simple solution. So what you are saying is not really related to the question.

I don't think the opinions of ESR, Linus, and tytso are relevant here either as none of those people work on init systems. If you developed your own solutions with shell scripts, that's great for you, but I hope you can see how that doesn't work at scale in a big distribution. BTW systemd includes a lightweight implementation of containers so I also don't understand what you're talking about when you said you needed to then put it in a VM or container. The exact problem you're having can also be solved... by just using systemd. So it actually seems like you're making things more complex than it needs to be by jumping through hoops to avoid it.

Audio is also my expertise, and using just ALSA is an experience in pain. You need some kind of userspace daemon in order to get a good experience with that.