So Linus showed his entire ass ( again, if you've been paying attention in the last twenty years, but for some reason this one really got noticed ), and now I keep seeing people talking about building weird #NetBSD / Debian hybrids, how Devuan was trying that, and

You know you can just run NetBSD right? No need to loot it for replacement parts, it's a stable modern OS that works fine exactly as it is.

Putting the GNU userland on top of it will be a lot of work to catch up with what it already is, and carries the reward of having Richard Stallman's slime on everything.