Most of my systems avoid a boot partition, boot process is BIOS/UEFI -> grub (from EFI partition or MBR block) -> linux (from /boot in root).

However I do got one where UEFI boots the linux kernel directly, /boot is the EFI parition. And there it feels like a bit of a waste to have to expand /boot or insert a bootloader into the boot process because initramfs is getting bloated with files that aren't critical to mounting root.