[jalgos_eminator]

> So you're thinking about more and more corner cases, that require the stars to be just right for the size of systemd to matter.

These weren't corner cases, they were everyday reality. We had to intentionally slim down the firmware size to get it to fit comfortably since we added quite a bit of application code. Like I said before, we got a recovery firmware down to ~3MB, and the normal firmware (without our application) was ~8MB. Every megabyte counts at that point, so having a 1MB init system would be a non-starter. We were buying commodity hardware, so we did lots of shopping and there were still plenty of 16MB APs on the market 10 years ago.

You're right its not a problem if you buy new hardware, but OpenWRT is used to support older devices with limited hardware specs. Its one of the reasons people install it, to give new life to old hardware (rather than being forced to buy a new device).

By the way, I use and like systemd on full size computers. I actually know of a product that runs a full rpm based distro (with systemd) on an embedded device and it works great. But systemd isn't one size fits all.