The BSDs are *nix-like systems without glibc with a history and larger communities.
You can run programs requiring glibc on musl-based distros using a simple chroot though (not to mention using Flatpak/Snap or similar solutions).
Also, as someone who uses a distro without systemd (Void) - my boot and shutdown are both very fast and service management is simple (I didn’t need to read any documentation to define new daemons, I just looked at existing definitions); this is in contrast to my experience the last few times I used systemd distros.
I even had a Debian setup I used regularly with SysV init a few years ago, which also had way better boot/shutdown times than with systemd (on the same exact setup otherwise). Service management was a pain with SysV though.