I did not say "All you have to do is." I said "That sounds easy to fix", and it is. Reparenting a process to init is a common idiom (fork + setsid, see `man 2 setsid`). (x)inetd is therefore capable of doing it, it just did not because of the constraints at the time.
I am well aware of modern design patterns, but thank you. Dependency resolution during startup is a great idea, but it is also something that could be saved statically (which is _exactly_ what the management people built around init did) because the startup resolution order only changes when something is added or removed from init. So, somehow, for decades, we got by with the "worse" approach.
I don't see how one would need to install X and ghostscript to get a tty, shell, and ls, unless one was using a distribution build by incompetents.