Ubuntu uses grub recordfail and has done so for years. Userspace records if the boot was successful and the bootloader can use this to change it's behaviour (eg

Ubuntu uses grub recordfail and has done so for years. Userspace records if the boot was successful and the bootloader can use this to change it's behaviour (eg. boot a previous kernel). I think by default it stops at the boot menu for user intervention but on a headless system you can configure it to automatically boot the previous kernel/initrd instead. I think Debian has the same but I'm not sure. Ubuntu Core (eg. for the upcoming immutable desktop) also supports this kind of thing fully automatically. So it's not just systemd and the alternatives are widely deployed already. But anyway as others point out it won't mitigate risk on a system that injects bad code from outside of the boot process.