What's stopping anyone from maintaining the ONE PURE SYSTEM-FREE DISTRO (tm)?
Nothing. Actions have shown that distro maintainers overwhelmingly prefer systemd because it's way easier to maintain than sysv init (from what I hear anyways). I'd put money on the author of the blog not being a distro maintainer - just some guy that complains on the internet.
Wife got one a few years ago that had multiple hardware issues that took a ridiculous amount of back and forth to get them to fix . Talking months of effort.
Stolen from wiki but it's a common story that Grace Hopper would tell:
In 1946, when Hopper was released from active duty, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark II and Mark III. Operators traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. Stemming from the first bug, today we call errors or glitches in a program a bug.[14]
I make regular use of software that requires both SafetyNet and up to date security patching unfortunately. I'd love to run something like Lineage on Fairphone if it could meet those requirements.
Very affordable, thank you Iran: https://digilent.com/shop/zedboard-zynq-7000-arm-fpga-soc-development-board/