> An old and somewhat crusty cross-platform daemon replaced by an OS-specific set of daemons, that takes care of managing /etc files that have been there forever. The older solution remains available, but may bitrot or otherwise become harder to maintain in the future.

> Wait, isn't this what systemd is "accused" of doing all the time?

Each of these do one thing and one thing only. The code is loosely coupled between the two, so you can use or not use either/both. Basically the opposite of systemd, which is a giant code ball of code with components tightly coupled.

And while it is likely that dhclient will eventually be removed from OpenBSD Base, it will live on in Ports, where it will be available to those who desire to use it:

* https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/ports/net/isc-dhcp/

* https://github.com/openbsd/ports/tree/master/net/isc-dhcp

The use or non-use of of either of these program will also not effect device discovery / hot-plugging, mounting of file systems, system run levels, network time, system logging, etc.

One of the programs does DHCP. One does resolve.conf(5) changes. Each does nothing else. It may even be possible to port each of these programs to another operating system, as I suspect they don't need special APIs (*cough*dbus*cough*) and may mostly just use POSIX-y stuff.