Thinking about it a bit more, though, it does feel like a hybrid approach is probably better. For dual-booting off local disks and other simple cases, just having the kernel and initramfs alongside other OS options makes a lot of sense, and you can use the UEFI boot menu or something deliberately simple like systemd-boot to select between them for dual-boot or recovery. For more complex cases (where your rootfs is not just something the kernel can mount on its own), instead you basically just want a process for building your initramfs to do that from a config like grub (which is already how a lot of cases like that are solved, anyway), and in extreme cases where you also want to stash a kernel in some other location then you can use kexec from that. But for just a boot menu (which is aready in the minority case and 90% of users in that case need nothing more) it feels even heavier than grub for little benefit.