Yeah, I think it's an unusual case, but I wanted to bring it up to support your point about rejecting their kernel and distro. You can put Incus on a lot of different systems. Don't like systemd? Put it on Void. Want a declarative setup? NixOS. Minimalist? Alpine.
Do I want to maintain a full operating system just to run this one type of software? No, that's absurd. I want to choose the distro I want to work with and then have the software work on top of it.