All of which you described works for me in Debian, one of my laptops is also shared by the family. I believe that now systemd is so much more common that paths

All of which you described works for me in Debian, one of my laptops is also shared by the family. I believe that now systemd is so much more common that paths without it are less tested and way more prone to bugs. Systemd was kind of a problem many many years ago while it was a new thing and still barely tested, but now it's mostly stable. Don't let your past experience impair your judgement of how things are in 2023. Everybody putting money on Linux is on systemd.