Make BSD great again!
And those 80 daemons are started via various systemd and dbus interfaces, and some via other means. If you have a daemon disruptive to your session (like ibus overriding the effect of setxkbmap in a i3 session), and you want to disable it... good luck with finding out what started it.
> reliant upon PAM for authentication and don't support shadow passwords
PAM supports a shadow password file as its default configuration. Did you mean something else?
It looks like some software projects are now entirely reliant upon PAM for authentication and don't support shadow passwords anymore. What a travesty. It's sort of like what happened with Systemd, where so many apps now entirely depend on Systemd, you can't run a Linux desktop without a "fake Systemd" to make things work. (see: Alpine Linux desktop, Slackware desktop)
All of this seems to be due to a kind of creepy crawly takeover of the system components, with new ones designed by enterprise companies and a few highly-opinionated software developers (who work at those companies). They design these components to do a million different things, but they also make them highly coupled and interdependent (which is terrible software design, but standard for enterprise products). This then results in a much more complex system with many more moving parts, and makes breaking it easier.
Since these companies hold sway over the most popular Linux distros with the most users, when they make a radical change, everybody else has to adopt it, just like with the browser world. Powerful incumbents exert an unfair (and unhealthy) amount of influence on our environment.
If you went back to a distro from 20 years ago, there really should only be a couple components: The X ecosystem (kernel drivers, userland drivers, rendering libraries), a console login program, a tty manager, a wifi manager, and, well... i'm struggling to think of anything else you need [after the system has booted]. Kernel drivers used to make up 90% of the hardware interfaces. Originally you just wrote to a device file for things like sound, printing, etc. It was an extremely simple system and it worked very well.
Today you have 80 different daemons all running at the same time in order for the system to work at all. Event buses, policy engines, management frameworks, a couple dozen libraries, and multiple layers of components to do something as simple as run a graphical app in a windowed environment. Is this all necessary? Clearly not, as we did without all this crap 20 years ago. Somebody screwed the pooch on system design.
Luckily, it's Linux, so nobody is forcing us to use all this shit. We can just start over with a new, much simpler system (and try hard as hell to avoid second system effect)