It's still better than pulling down the entire weight and redundancy of GRUB. I guess you could make the argument that the bootloader is sort of a vestigial nec

It's still better than pulling down the entire weight and redundancy of GRUB. I guess you could make the argument that the bootloader is sort of a vestigial necessity from historical shortcomings in PC firmwares that have now been, if not necessarily improved per se, at least juiced up. But yes, we're heading into the direction of booting kernels as EFI executables from stub loaders, at least in the contemporary GNU/Linux world. Further, you can just hardcode a cpio archive of an initramfs inside a kernel configured for building with EFI stub support. Downsides are your CONFIG_CMDLINE (boot params) becomes hardcoded into the kernel configuration, unless you use something like efibootmgr to keep regenerating kernels with different boot parameters. But given the trend of lowering and hiding customizability, I expect it to be par for the course. systemd merging in Gummiboot into their source tree should give you an idea of what's to come in the future.