It depends on what your bottleneck is. For example on my system I get

$ systemd-analyze                                                       
Startup finished in 11.976s (firmware) + 3.879s (loader) + 2.013s (kernel) + 157ms (initrd) + 6.354s (userspace) = 24.382s 
graphical.target reached after 6.316s in userspace.

The kernel boot process is only responsible for 2s of my boot time. So even if this does end up improving boot times, there’s very little it can do. The real improvement for me would be to choose a faster-booting m/b. You can run systemd-analyze on your setup to see if the kernel boot time is more significant for you.

I really don’t understand the benefit of being federated

The benefit is to prevent this from being the next Reddit. Being a nonprofit doesn’t really guarantee anything in the long term. OpenAI was a non profit and now it isn’t… Rather than trust a single entity to not abuse its power, federation aims to not give any entity all the power to begin with.

It also solves practical problems. Which single benign entity would pay for the servers and internet connections to become the new reddit? I don’t think there is one.