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There's plenty of live CD / USB OS's out there (albeit most being based on Linux). I've found they've more than covered my DOS use case of "I need to boot something in order to examine this busted computer".

> bootloader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin

(I love the idea of a bootloader I could play Doom on!)

I'll do you one better, DOOM without an OS at all (sort of) https://github.com/Cacodemon345/uefidoom

The Linux console has more functionality than DOS ever did, sans GUI.

> I see no replacement for it in the free world

I know what you mean, but what about GRUB and UEFI? I think both of those could be supplemented to be able to do a lot of the same things, don't you think?

Grub is great but has no write access and doesn’t allows me run eg. run a full compiler.

Well, the UEFI shell does.

what about the bog-standard efi shell that comes in the firmware with practically every PC these days?

it even resembles DOS (much more than it does any other os, at least)