Probably Devuan or Solus. I hate systemd but Solus is very impressive.

In order to bolster my earlier point about taking a cue from the community here regarding where to go, I found a very nice post from an old Debian dev. The Slackware community is first-rate, and I would likely end up wherever most of the members did because of their expertise, the high standard of conversation, and the fact that the individuals here help to elevate one to another level of ability [as long as the user is able to put in some work]. This very nice quote from Manoj Srivastava's article, "Why Linux? Why Debian?" sums things up nicely:

In fact [and ironically in relation to the above] it was the slow collapse of the Debian community which led me to run Slackware as my primary system. Of course, that article is over ten years old, and Debian was a very different OS then. Slackware's ethic, however, appears to have persisted.

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slackware (unsupported) :-) The scripts to build would still be there, as would sbopkg. but hopefully that doesn't ever happen. Hopefully kernel 5 comes soon and with it slackware 15 and pat sorts out a new shop or something to raise cash to keep going. The folks on the slackware forum, and involved with slackbuilds.org (and eric of course:-) ) are so helpful and knowledgeable I wouldn't want to loose that, and having the control of your own system is great, even if some software is some what horrendous to configure!.

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Honestly, this is a hard question to answer for me.

I feel like it would be a toss up between Debian (testing for desktop, stable for server), Arch Linux, or KDE Neon (the latter two, only for the desktop).

I think Fedora comes closest to what I would want to use in THEORY, but every time I try to fire it up it really doesn't work well for me at all. Firstly, I have this habit of using it as a vehicle to try out the latest version of GNOME3. "This time I'll like it," I think to myself, and I always land up still hating it, which leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Also, last time I tried it (FC28 I believe) WINE would mysteriously segfault when I tried to run MS Office. When I ran it under strace or gdb, it would not. So I just ended up giving up since I figured it would be too difficult to troubleshoot. Wasn't happening on Slackware, Debian or Ubuntu.

The closest to Slackware philosophically, that doesn't have SystemD, so probably Devuan.

I don't think Devuan is close to Slackware philosophy, is it? It automates dependency resolution for a start. Does it only use shell scripts and text files for maintenance? Also, as far as I'm aware, decisions on Devuan are taken by a team rather than a BDFL.

The closest that doesn't have SystemD. I meant that in terms of simplicity and stability. Actually, maybe one of the BSDs…

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Maybe VoidLinux because no SystemD? Never tried it though.

I'm a fairly new slacker but I find I've really taken to it. It's nice and streamlined, definitely KISS. I certainly don't think it deserves its unfriendly reputation.

I used to be very fond of both Crux and LFS, but it's getting more and more difficult to run source-based systems because of the build requirements of modern software (rust and so forth). That means no Gentoo either and I don't like Arch. I tried it briefly years ago and somehow took against it.

So if Slackware disappeared, I'd probably go back to Debian, with which I'm very familiar. Or Devuan perhaps.

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I have to agree, I really like CRUX, but insane build requirements for certain projects have made it too much like hard work.

From the GLIBC docs:
I mean, seriously... wtf!

Python??? For glibc? How the hell can you get a system build started then?

It is the rise of silicon intelligence. Given a base gcc you can build Python. Given a base Python, you can build an advanced gcc. Iterate and homo sapiens is left wondering. Go evolution!

LFS also starts with a very basic gcc and uses that to build the full version. But how can you build Python (or anything else for that matter) without a working glibc?

I already run other things in addition to Slackware: OpenIndiana, OpenBSD, macOS, Devuan. I guess I'm covered.

I guess you have to build it on a fully loaded host. I must admit when I first saw this I was wondering what the implications would be for LFS and their stage1 bootstrap process.