> the great de-Poettering
If I remember correctly, Devuan uses sysv, yes? Other than Pulse Audio, what other Poettering software is in normal Debian?

Well, systemd, including logind, which was incredibly unstable for me under manjaro (basic session management was flaky).

Devuan uses elogind, which is a fork of logind that doesn't require systemd. I haven't noticed any problems with it.