(Stock kernels come with all kinds of bells and whistles because they have to be compatible with every imaginable hardware a common user might conceivably be using.  That's why compiling your own kernel will almost always save lots of space, because you can leave out (lots of) stuff you know you won't use.)

(I don't even have the driver for the built-in PC speaker compiled -- because I find it annoying and useless. So my PC is completely silent except when I actually tell it to play an audio through alsa. It saves me the annoyance of having to listen to beeping sounds from the terminal. :-P)

For my work PCs I'm too lazy to go through the trouble of handcrafting the system like this. Plus, policy-mandated hardware tend to be gratuitously incompatible with random stuff. So I just use the stock distro kernel instead... because my employer pays me to work not configure Linux kernels.

I'm even more motivated these days since current kernel on my machine is 408 mb, wow, I remember when they were much smaller....

More details at the links:

https://distrowatch.com/weekly-mobile.p … 23#feature

http://tinycorelinux.net/book.html

Have fun with initramfs. It's s good way to understand how linux works.

i get why distro use initramfs
but from a more philosophical standpoint, its unnecessary bloat if you know your drivers

Yes, you can compile in all the drivers you need and boot without dynamic /dev or early module loading. That's how it was done when compiling your own kernel was normal practice and booting from a floppy disk was a thing.
It's still quite possible to go that way, assuming you know what drivers you need to mount root. Systemd might make life difficult, but that's nothing new either.

I still have a bunch of Slackware 7 boot disks on my desk, and besides needing to pick the right one for your hardware (because that's the price for no initrd and a 1.4MB kernel), there's nothing particularly fun or novel about them... They're just minimal kernel images with disk controller and filesystem drivers compiled in.
So what? I mean it's trivial to boot even modern Slackware without an initrd, why the big writeup? That "guide" makes it sound like the dude just rediscovered fire or something