I agree. There is literally 0 reason to buy anything from Apple when there are much better and much cheaper options that are already well supported by GNU/Linux. I will never understand people who will go out of their way to waste money on the next big thing from Apple only to get Linux on it.

On distros w/o systemd there is always syslog-ng. s6 also has its own log system.

It’s not necessary, but a good thing to have if something goes wrong and you want to debug/monitor something. It’s really up to you and your needs.