And eons ago, people made fun of me for using MS-DOS and loadlin as a bootloader for Linux. (This always worked fine for me, and MS-DOS was simple to make boot and install tools on with hardware of the time. A functional-enough MS-DOS installation took up a trivial amount of space on a garden-variety PC of the day, and it was easy to pare down.)
Fast forward 20 or 30 years: We're back to using a FAT[32] partition for booting, just with a very different mini-OS to do the job.
I dunno that it’s really all that different. EFI is sort of what DOS would likely have become if MS had kept with it. It uses PE format, has back slash paths, has the same .3 extensions, and so on. There are certainly many similarities.
What's different is that using loadlin on MS-DOS was "lol, fuckin' newb" material (even though it was exquisitely functional and ridiculously easy to use), while the potentially very similar EFI system is a heralded as a champion.
I guess I am trying to express my annoyance with the Linux crowd's fickle nature over the years.
My own (perhaps old) hardware gives me a choice of old-school BIOS, or more-modern UEFI.
(But perhaps amusingly-counter to my original suggestion, old-ass archaic emulated BIOS seems to still be preferred in some spaces in the VM-using crowd -- at least where things like libvirt are involved. In those spaces, BIOS usually works fine and it generally boots faster than *EFI.)
Fast forward 20 or 30 years: We're back to using a FAT[32] partition for booting, just with a very different mini-OS to do the job.
le sigh.