Josh Triplett:
(Personally, I *wish* that /etc/rc.local didn't exist at all by
default and you had to *create* it if you wanted it used.)
So too did Lennart Poettering.
* https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=734268
Matthew Dillon went a step further, and deleted /etc/rc.local from
FreeBSD in December 1998 making that very situation the case. OpenBSD's
/etc/rc and the backwards compatibility mechanisms in Mewburn rc and
systemd also permit it to not exist at all.
* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/rc.local-is-history.html