What about Lua/Luajit?
In most scripting languages you have the interpreter binary and the (standard) libraries as separate files. But creating self-extracting executables, that clean up after themselves can easily be done by wrapping them in a shell script.
IMO, if low dependencies and small size is really important, you could also just write your script in a low level compiled language (C, Rust, Zig, …), link it statically (e.g. with musl) and execute that.
I started using Fedora Silverblue on a tablet, seems to work fine so far, but requiring a reboot in order to install new system packages is a bit cumbersome and the process itself takes a while, but ordinary Fedora also doesn’t win any races when asked to install a new package
I think switching to FCOS or Flatcar on servers that just use containers makes sense. Since it lessens the burden of administrating the base system itself. Using butan/ignition might be unusual at first, but it also allows to put the base system configuration into a git repo, and makes initial provisioning using ansible or similar unnecessary. The rest of the system and services can be managed via portainer or similar software.
I also do not have long term experience with FCOS, but the advertised features of auto-update, rolling-release, focus on security and stability makes it a good fit for container servers, IMO.
An alternative to Debian on servers might also be Apline Linux. Which also has more a focus on network devices, but some people use it on a desktop as well.
If you have many different systems, and just want to learn to operate them all, maybe NixOS might be interesting. Using flakes, you can configure multiple machines from just one repo, and share configurations between them. But getting up to speed on NixOS might not be so easy, it has a steep learning curve.
So generally the pro of coreboot is that it is open source, but the con is that it is open source.
What I mean by that, you can fix any issues yourself, however, if you are unable to do it yourself, you have to wait until someone does it for you and often what features are available and stable are a hit and miss.
Compared to proprietary bioses, the company has some kind of standardized process for developing the bios. So you often get want you would expect. However, if the money flow from the pc vendor to the bios vendor drys up, you, or the community of owners. will not be able to fix any issues.
Linux support should be the same, regardless if you choose proprietary or open source bios. But that depends on how well the coreboot was ported to the platform. So officially supported coreboot bioses are likely better than others.
Personally, if all other attributes are equal, would go with coreboot, because I like to support vendors that offer that choice, and IMO a open source solution, that you can review and build yourself is intrinsically more secure than a binary blob, where you have to blindly trust some corporation. But other security minded people might disagree, which is fine.
Check if you find anything about this in the kernel log (dmesg).
Not the drama itself should influence your judgment, but how they will deal with it.
Whenever people work together on something, there will be some drama, but if they are dealing with it, then that should be fine.
Nix and NixOS are big enough, that even if it fails, there are enough other people that will continue it, maybe under a different name.
Even it that causes a hard fork, which I currently think is unlikely, there are may examples where that worked and resolved itself over time, without too much of burden on the users, meaning there are clear migration processes available: owncloud/nextcloud, Gogs/Gitea/Forgejo, redis/valkey, …
Or other standard archiving formats like WARC.
There also is https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox which looks a bit similar.
Snap is just one case where Ubuntu is annoying.
It is also a commercial distribution. If you ever used a community distribution like Arch, Gentoo or even Debian, then you will notice that they much more encourage participation. You can contribute your ideas and work without requiring to sign any CLAs.
Because Ubuntu wants to control/own parts of the system, they tend to, rather then contributing to existing solutions, create their own, often subpar, software, that requires CLAs. See upstart vs openrc or later systemd, Mir vs Wayland, which they both later adopted anyway, Unity vs Gnome, snap vs flatpak, microk8 vs k3s, bazar vs git or mercurial, … The NIH syndrom is pretty strong in Ubuntu. And even if Ubuntu came first with some of these solutions, the community had to create the alternative because they where controlling it.
At that point we get a tag system. Content Warning: politics, Content Warning: bad news, Content Warning: dangerous cuteness…
So similar to kakoune? I tried that for a while, but it was missing some features so I went back to vim/neovim.
I need to know vi anyway, because that is available everywhere (as part of busybox), so using vim/nvim for bigger systems just fits.