There's almost no circumstance I can imagine where giving up a solid usable well known OS sounds tempting to me. Getting Debian running on PogoPlugs and OpenWRT devices has been a repeated ordeal I'vd gladly traversed. Having a well behaved
normal OS that meets many user's expectations (but has your special stuff regularly installed!) is divine.
I used to run Debian Live, and appreciated the tiny amount of shell hacking they have to layer persistent storage filesystem atop a ro filesystem- identical to how theres a ro container image then the mutable rw layer atop it... but a decade older!
I find that the pretense of running "live" is largely gone. It's basically become a meaningless difference of what medium you run on but I've been using the same scripts to create the necessary root OS & UEFI EFI filesystem (FAT32 with a magic partition-type, populated with the bootloader & config). often I spin up systems by just copying a btrfs snapshot & rsync'ing efi directory (and updating some partition uuid's, regenerate machine-id), then I have two systems. Live feels meaningless, non-distinct from regular to me.
All these attempts to treat things different & distinctly, to make special cases for ourself- oh we need a network/router oriented OS, we need a bare OS, we need a consumer OS, we need a NAS os- so rarely have I ever felt like these attempts to flee from the fold & venture out to special really have rewards. This behavior of making exceptions for your problem, talking yourself out of doing the easy normal base thing, seems so rarely to me to have rewards. Run Debian, run systemd, run normal well-known tools! Unless you're really certain getting off the base path really is essential, has huge specific merit.
That's why I like this effort. It allows customization & baking your own thing, but it's much more routine & regular & normal than so many "make your own OS" projects, where folks tend to be quite "back to the land" in motive. Let's make our own OS from sticks! Yeah! But no. You almost certainly should have an ok userland base in my view. Debian is a pretty great one.