Like many of my fellow Devuaners, I tend to favor simple solutions over
complex ones.

I'd probably be fine with extlinux, though at the moment my preferred
bootloader is still Grub-Legacy. So easy to configure, and it "Just Works"™
every time. I'm only forced to mess with it when I install a new distro
that rams Grub2 down your throat, in which case I usually fix it by booting
Puppy Linux and running the included Grub1 installer, then copying my
already-tweaked menu.lst file to the /boot partition.

I do realize that Grub-Legacy wasn't made to work with UEFI/GPT partitions,
and that Grub2 is the touted solution to that problem. The thing is, I have
had rather bad luck with GPT - I've tried it several times, and though it
works more-or-less, I've had numerous occasions when it fails to boot for
no apparent reason, forcing me to reboot, and sometimes even that second
boot fails, forcing me to reboot again. Some days are worse than others, so
maybe it has to do with the position of the moon and stars. Anyway, this
has never happened to me with the supposedly "obsolete" MBR partitioning
scheme.

I'm not conservative, and I'm perfectly willing to adopt "modern" solutions
if they actually solve something, rather than creating new problems.

Although the term is probably obsolete by now, systemd, Grub2, UEFI/GPT and
"secure boot" all remind me of what used to be called a "Rube Goldberg
machine"...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine

If there's a more modern term for this, I'd be interested in knowing what
it is.

cheers,
Robert