USB rescue distros are nice, but that assumes you have a USB stick to use and already had the rescue distro installed. That doesn't help when you are trying to fix some failed update late at night with the computer in question being the only hardware available. Contrived example? Yes, but I've been in more or less that situation a couple times in the past and was very thankful that init=/bin/bash worked as a fallback.
// yes, most of the time I just put fallback/rescue options in the boot menu
// yes, most of the time I just put fallback/rescue options in the boot menu