Recently I implemented a manufacturing-time device provisioning process that consisted of a Linux kernel (with the efistub), netbooted directly from the UEFI firmware, with a compiled-in bundled initramfs with a single init binary written in Go as the entire userland. It's very freeing when the entire operating environment consists of code you import from packages and directly program in your high level language of choice, as opposed to interacting with the system through subprocesses and myriad whacky and wonderfully different text configuration files.