The era when running gnome or any of its derivatives without systemd comes to mind. If it weren't for Gentoo's forks of systemd components, the whole situation would be much worse in general.

> I literally work on a device that is still uses an inittab.

The fact that this is so rare it has to be pointed out like this kind of speaks for itself.

> 1) eudev works 2) elogind works 3) you can still use sysvinit or literally the multitude of others.

I am aware of these and use them on nearly all my machines.

Note that both elogind and eudev required a significant amount of work by the Gentoo community when they were pulled out of the systemd codebase.