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I don't think there is anything really stopping you from standing up a Gentoo system with OpenRC from the systemd installer or vice versa though. It seems really more like a convenience than a requirement to have both installers.

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To be precise, there is a single installer image that you boot and use to create the partition layout. Then you pick a stage 3 tarball and unpack it into the root partition, and this tarball is either OpenRC-specific or systemd-specific.

Yes it is possible to change your mind and switch from one to the other after installation, but it's not straightforward.

IIRC the Kernel needs to know which one you use too.

The kernel usually just needs to know which binary to execute as init, which is often provided as kernel command line argument by the bootloader.

I use syslinux, which is manually updated, no init is passed in.

In the Gentoo kernel make menuconfig there are options for Systemd vs OpenRC - not entirely sure what they do.

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