That is a nice approach. I'll have to give that a try with rclone. I tried lots of things in the past but not using Alpine which is a great idea

Another alternative is

https://github.com/ebitengine/purego

You can use this to dynamic load shared objects / DLLs so in the OP example they could disable systemd support if the systemd shared object did not load.

This technique is used in the cgofuse library ( https://github.com/winfsp/cgofuse ) rclone uses which means rclone can run even if you don't have libfuse/winfsp installed. However the rclone mount subcommand won't work.

The purego lib generalizes this idea. I haven't got round to trying this yet but it looks very promising.