There are various kinds of Linux distributions, some super minimalist, others not so much. The point of having various distributions is exactly that, you have a choice.

> systemd

It indeed tends to be an emotive word, but just saying 'systemd' as if that's automatically saying something isn't helping either.

There's things one could criticize about systemd, a lot systemd has going for it and many would argue that having a predictable, well-defined, declarative service definition syntax, that's consistent no matter the package or system, vs various sets of init shell scripts that probably wary quite widely in quality and are just slightly different across the *BSDs to possibly surprise you, is what makes systemd in fact better.

As for ZFS not being invented in the Linux ecosystem, I haven't claimed that, just that it wasn't FreeBSD either.