Unix starts at root, which is how nature intended. It does not change characteristics based on media - you can mount a floppy at root if you want.
Why get upset over /media vs /mnt? You do you, I know I do.
For example The Step CA docs encourage using /etc/step-ca/ (https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/certificate-authority-ser...) for configuration for their product. Normally I would agree but as I am manually installing this thing myself and not following any of the usual docs, I've gone for /srv/step-ca.
I think we get enough direction from the ... "standards" ... for Unix file system layouts that any reasonably incompetent admin can find out which one is being mildly abused today and get a job done. On Windows ... good luck. I've been a sysadmin for both platforms for roughly 30 years and Windows is even odder than Unix.
Thinking of it in terms of namespaces might help; it's not that the drive is special, it's that there's a view that starts from / and one disk filesystem happens to be dropped there and others are dropped elsewhere; with something like initramfs there aren't any drives on /, just a chunk of ram, though you usually pivot to a physical one later (many linux-based embedded systems don't because your one "drive" is an SD card that can't handle real use, so you just keep the "skeleton" in memory and drop various bits of eMMC or SD or whatever into the tree as-convenient.)
The point is that any filesystem can be chosen as the OS’s root.
The root of all other filesystems - there could be multiple per drive - is where you tell the filesystem to be mounted, or in your automounter’s special directory, usually /run/media, where it makes a unique serial or device path.
Why get upset over /media vs /mnt? You do you, I know I do.
For example The Step CA docs encourage using /etc/step-ca/ (https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/certificate-authority-ser...) for configuration for their product. Normally I would agree but as I am manually installing this thing myself and not following any of the usual docs, I've gone for /srv/step-ca.
I think we get enough direction from the ... "standards" ... for Unix file system layouts that any reasonably incompetent admin can find out which one is being mildly abused today and get a job done. On Windows ... good luck. I've been a sysadmin for both platforms for roughly 30 years and Windows is even odder than Unix.