What makes it a monolith is that the 70 binaries refuse to do their one job (see: Unix philosophy) independently.
A few months ago, a systemd update broke my boot process because I dared set up my device-mapper nodes manually in a minimal initrd without having a second copy of systemd in there as well. The device is there, yet systemd times out "waiting for device". How come then a manual mount -a in the rescue shell works then?
If course, the bug had already been reported and swiftly rejected by L. "Hurr durr bother your distributor not me" Pottering.
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