Debian choosing systemd (not that it's a new decision) is the reason I'll be switching my Proxmox to FreeBSD/bhyve (FreeBSD has great ZFS support btw).
Once I get the hypervisor systemd-free (no systemd on FreeBSD), I can then install a minimal distro in a VM mean to do containerization (like, say, the Talos Linux distro for K8s, that only has a few executables and they're all immutable) and then I can run containers that, by design, have something that is precisely not systemd as PID1.
So life is good: there's a systemd-free world at the end of the tunnel.
Once I get the hypervisor systemd-free (no systemd on FreeBSD), I can then install a minimal distro in a VM mean to do containerization (like, say, the Talos Linux distro for K8s, that only has a few executables and they're all immutable) and then I can run containers that, by design, have something that is precisely not systemd as PID1.
So life is good: there's a systemd-free world at the end of the tunnel.