ok so tell me why I’m waiting for networking to come up before I’m allowed to interact with my computer

Because your distro sets up stuff weirdly? At least I never noticed networkd to be a dependency of multi-user.target, could be wrong though.

Also, its monolithic as heck, its a giant squid into my networking, time management, access control…

That’s all optional though, many distros just use it because it’s easier than the alternatives.

Ontop of that… binary logs ew.

Yeah, that’s indeed stupid. No clue why they did that.