There are plenty of Systemdless forks of distros. People do maintain and it works well. However, the issue is to make the forks its incredibly labor intensive for coders and while not impossible to remove systemd, it’s extremely hard. When base apps require systemd, it locks you down to that one system which is why people hate it so much. It centralizes code and the systems and prevents ease of choice. Does it work? Yes. Though even if it doesn’t affect you or your thoughts, its good to understand why there is a divide. I personally use Artix Linux at the moment with S6 as my init system and it works great. I get why people like Systemd, but I feel it sterilizes our freedom of choice like a frog in a pot of water.

To anyone who finds this and has had this issue: appears to have been solved for me by changing my file descriptors limit from 4096 to 524288.

Chorizos and Honey on a pizza. Its so good!