I have been sold on the idea of "you don't pay for what you don't use" for longer than I can remember. Minimalism and "strictly necessary" was the guiding star that brought me to the Gentoo, Linux from Scratch, djb-style software, suckless project, sysvinit and other nice things. In general, it prompted me to understand deeper the operating system I am using to be able to tell which part of it is not strictly necessary.
Recent years I have been using Nixpkgs, and I did some contributions to fix redundancy or build of reduced configurations, but all too long I have been ignoring the elephant in the room.
borgmatic: make dependency on systemd conditional
I have been using NixOS (pid1 = systemd) for quite some time, but I still cherished a dream that one day, I will be able to build a "strictly necessary" system based on Nixpkgs. Uhm, no.
Rebuild emacs with dbus? Static "dvtm"? Patched "dwm" or "djbdns"? Yeah, sure. How about a sweeping change, like "systemdSupport = false"? Well, that triggers rebuild of the world, including chromium which takes more than a night to build. And I still end up with horrendous blob I have no hope to understand. And it is only getting slower due to the Wirth's Law.
Gentoo reddit thread on chromium build times
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
It is not plausible to ever reach the state when I no longer need the chromium, either: Chrome-applications are eating this world. We used to have nice things called "standards" and "protocols", not anymore.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272697/market-share-desktop-internet-browser-usa/
We still can have some nice things, but minimalistic every-day system is not one of them.