You use reproducible, read only rootfs (essentially what a “live” distro is, to some extent) because it’s 1, reproducible, so you’re not stuck when the system dies for some weird reason 2, it’s read only meaning nothing will modify it. This gives you a base that is stable, easily reproduced on any host, and isn’t up to the whims of what packages you installed and such.
NixOS is a good candidate for this approach but you can literally turn any distro into such a base. Though it’s preferred to use one dedicated to such endeavours.
Nobody said anything about bulk mounting anything though? I said mount your data partitions, because presumably you’d have multiple disks holding your data thus multiple partitions…
And the fact you’ve been working with Linux for 20+ years and have no fucking clue about why someone would want their rootfs RO or RW makes me seriously worried about the very statement that you worked with Linux for 20 years without an understanding of such a basic OS function.

















Further confirmation that the Christian god is actually just post-Ragnarok Loki.