I do want to clarify: it's not Linux itself, but specific distributions (or rather their package managers). As far as I know, Arch's pacman would do nothing to stop me 🥰
True, Linux applications (e.g. apt, dnf, pip, but also rm, sudo, and many more) would be more precise.
For Arch, it's probably not so easy to define "essential" packages, as it, for example, supports many different bootloaders. It is of course also a question of distro philosophy and target audience. Personally, I've noticed that "rm -r" as root prompts for every file on RHEL but does not on Arch...
Yeah, swapped out grub for systemd-init on a running Arch system not too long ago. Arch is cool with it. Be sure not to make any really bad typos while you've not got a boot manager, of course.
Eh, I've previously fucked up my bootloader, all you need to do to fix it is boot up a live image, mount your root partition, arch-chroot into it, then follow normal steps to set the bootloader back up - it's not scary if you know what you're doing, just time-consuming