> At the end of the day, it's about getting work done, not making decisions that are the most "pure".
This attitude will lead to a total breakdown of the development process over the long term. You are privileging Work Done At The End Of The Day over everything else.
You need to consider work done at every relevant time scale.
How much can you get done today?
How much can you get done this month?
How much can you get done in 5 years?
Ignore any of these questions at your peril. I fundamentally agree with you about purity though. I'm not sure what in my piece made you think I think Purity Uber Alles is the right way to go.
Then I'll point to the wide success of monolithic utilities such as systemd as evidence that consolidating typically helps long term.
Which is to say, not shockingly, it is typically a tradeoff debate where there is no toggle between good and bad. Just a curve that constantly jumps back and forth between good and bad based on many many variables.
systemd is also completely useless on its own. It still needs a bootloader, a kernel, and user-space programs to run.
When it comes to process managers, there is obviously disagreement about how complex they should be, but systemd is still a system to manage and collect info about processes.
The hierarchical merging workflow used by the Linux kernel does mean that there's more friction for wide-ranging, across-the-whole-tree changes than changes isolated to one subsystem.
Isolated changes will always be easier than cross cutting ones. The question really comes down to whether or not you have successfully removed cross cutting changes. If you have, then more isolation almost certainly helps. If you were wrong, and you have a cross cutting change you want to push, excessive isolation (with repos, build systems, languages, whatever), adds to the work. Which typically increases the odds of failure.
This attitude will lead to a total breakdown of the development process over the long term. You are privileging Work Done At The End Of The Day over everything else.
You need to consider work done at every relevant time scale.
How much can you get done today?
How much can you get done this month?
How much can you get done in 5 years?
Ignore any of these questions at your peril. I fundamentally agree with you about purity though. I'm not sure what in my piece made you think I think Purity Uber Alles is the right way to go.