Since the change, you could always use debian without systemd. It was trivial, especially for servers.
Desktops took more care, but that was still a non-issue.
But lately, especially since bookworm, things are less solid. rsyslogd is not a default install item now, and when you install it, there is no init script.
This is fine for servers which want centralized logging under systemd, because of course it can start syslog with the included unit file.
But if you remove systemd, by default you have no logging daemon, and once installed, no init script by default.
To my knowledge, this is not trivial (maybe not even possible now). there are simply too many packages that now define systemd as a requirement, like udev, dbus, etc.
If you want a systemd-free Debian, then Devuan is your go-to.
> What a strange place to put it, there's loads of sysinit scripts still
Well, apparently the rsyslog daemon itself does not include a sysvinit script; i.e. the rsyslog developers did not write or supply one. So it falls to the distribution, in this case Debian, packager to supply such a script. The Debian packager for the rsyslog package has chosen not to do the work of maintaining a sysvinit script. Debian has further chosen not to require sysvinit scripts for every package. Since maintaining a package is volunteer work, nobody could reasonably expect packagers to do work they don’t want to do which is not required. And thus the rsyslog package does not contain a sysvinit script.
The sysvinit scripts which used to be present in many Debian packages but which the corresponding packagers have chosen to not maintain, are still offered in the orphan-sysvinit-scripts package. The sysvinit-core package “recommends” (a Debian packaging term) the orphan-sysvinit-scripts package, which means that everybody who installs the sysvinit-core package should get the orphan-sysvinit-scripts package installed by default.
Desktops took more care, but that was still a non-issue.
But lately, especially since bookworm, things are less solid. rsyslogd is not a default install item now, and when you install it, there is no init script.
This is fine for servers which want centralized logging under systemd, because of course it can start syslog with the included unit file.
But if you remove systemd, by default you have no logging daemon, and once installed, no init script by default.
Easy to fix, but a reduced ease of use.