If GRUB is too confusing, just uninstall it? You said you have a UEFI system, you don’t need a bootloader. You can just put the vmlinuz and initramfs onto the ESP and boot into it directly. You can use efibootmgr to create the boot entry, something like this:

efibootmgr \
	--create \
	--disk /dev/sda \
	--part 1 \
	--index 0 \
	--label "Void linux" \
	--loader /vmlinuz-6.6.52_1 \
	--unicode " \
		root=PARTLABEL=VOID_ROOT \
		rw \
		initrd=\\initramfs-6.6.52_1.img \
		loglevel=4 \
		net.ifnames=0 \
		biosdevname=0 \
		nowatchdog \
		iomem=relaxed \
		"

• --disk /dev/sda: What disk is the esp on?
• --part 1 What partition number (counting from 1) is the esp on?
• --index 0 At what index in the boot menu should the boot entry appear?
• --loader Path to the vmlinuz file. These are normally in /boot, you have to move it to the esp yourself
• root=PARTLABEL=VOID_ROOT this is the linux root partiion. I’m using PARTLABEL to identify mine, but you can use pretty much anything that /etc/fstab supports
• initrd=\\initramfs-6.6.52_1.img Again, you have to move the initramfs file from /boot into the esp. For some reason this uses backslashes, not forward slashes as path separator (double backslashes in this case are to prevent the shell from interpreting it as an escape sequence)
• The rest of the arguments are just misc kernel parameters that I use

Just search for EFISTUB for more info.

modular daemons

A message bus won’t magically remove the need for developers to sit down together and agree on how some API would work. And not having a message bus also doesn’t magically prevent you from allowing for alternative implementations. Pipewire is an alternative implementation of pulseaudio, and neither of those rely on dbus (pulse can optionally use dbus, but not for its core features). When using dbus, developers have to agree on which path the service owns and which methods it exposes. When using unix sockets, they have to agree where the socket lives and what data format it uses. It’s all the same.

It can even start the receiving daemon if it is not yet running.

We have a tool for that, it’s called an init system. Init systems offer a large degree of control over daemons (centralized logging? making sure things are started in the correct order? letting the user disable and enable different daemons?). Dbus’ autostart mechanism is a poor substitute. Want to run daemons per-user instead of as root? Many init systems let you do that too (I know systemd and runit do).