yes they do, because the original purpose and value of the separation has gone. "back in the days" before there was an initrd you needed a small disk. that wa

yes they do, because the original purpose and value of the separation has gone. "back in the days" before there was an initrd you needed a small disk. that was /bin and /sbin. into that disk some /etc/rc.d/ file would mount a separate /use partition (and /home and /opt), often from network. however with pivot_root and initrd we don't need that dance any more and do another one... likewise the distinction between sbin and bin is gone. that's why they today just symlink together.