Zig has other selling points, that are arguably more suitable for system programming. Rust's obsession with safety (which is still not absolute even in rust) is not the only thing to consider.

Zig is indeed designed specifically for such tasks as system programming and interoperability with C code. However it is not yet ready for production usage as necessary infrastructure is not yet done and each new version introduces breaking changes. Developers recomend waiting version 1.0 before using it in any serious project.

Systemd bloats the container a lot more than glibc.

If xmpp and matrix are included, why not include email?

Does it have a separate add-on store?

If Mozilla gets blocked, people would just install some other browser (probably, something from Russia). I do not see how this helps anyone but the government itself. And departure of hundreds (if not thousands) of western companies did nothing to the Russian government, some problems with a browser with almost non-existent userbase would have the same effect. It should be quite clear by now that such tactic simply does not work.

Sorry for giving a rather useless advice. Of cause, you know about native packages, but since you are asking about flatpak, you, probably, have a reason to chose it. So, my original message was mostly intended as a joke, for which I am sorry.

VPNs are not categorically banned in Russia either. Just 95% of them. Categorical ban is not actually required here. Government can just create licensing procedure and license only those VPNs, which follow "rules". I do not see how this is different from ISP bans.

As a guy from Russia, I must admit that vpns are not a big problem for censors. They can be easily blocked, including self-hosted ones by protocol detection. And DNS would not do much with IP and clienthello-based blocks. And most users are not enough tech-savvy to constantly switch to new protocols as old ones get blocked.

I mean "something out of ordinary about it affects your experience with this distro the most".

I would say, that from most important to least important components are:

1. kernel
2. init system (systemd, openrc, runit...)
3. C library (glibc, musl)
4. filesystem
5. coreutils
6. shell
7. bootloader
8. package manager
9. x11/Wayland (if any)
10. sound system (if any)
11. WM (if any)
12. DE (if any)

Basically, if you do not see any reason to switch from systemd then you should not. The thing with systemd is that it is really big and complicated. If you just use defaults of your distro systemd works just fine, but if you want to (or have to) change something fundamental, then dealing with this monstrosity becomes a bit of pain. You basically end with the situation where you are in a war with your own PC. After some time of this, dealing with an init system that does exactly what you tell it to do feels refreshing. There is also the part, where some init systems (sysVinit and runit) boot faster then others (openRC and systemd), but it is not that significant. I use runit BTW. With my setup I spend much less time dealing with runit then I used to with systemd. That being said I still miss some of systemd features.