Took me a few tries but you really get a sense of accomplishment once you've bootstrapped your own system.

Then you realize what a pain in the butt updating is without a package manager :)

Exactly the same thought I had after installation. The system will get old and buggy real fast without a good package manager.

If you want to test the water, here is a mega script who does it all in one go in a qemu virtual machine (granted, still some standard manual install of some debian based bootstrap iso):

http://techinvest.li/tinux

Output is X Org and a falkon (chromium based) browser. But need some memory, diskspace and time.. Still a lot faster than doing it all by hand the first time around..

Trie to do this after about a year of learning programming which was probably too early in retrospect so I ended up kind of cargo culting it a bit and unable to boot. It would probably be more worthwhile for someone who knows something about the various tools and libraries.

Was wondering if I can do this on a macOS running on M1 and parallels - Any thoughts?

parallels meaning running Linux in a virtual machine on a m1 Mac? yes you can

Ah this brings back memories, learned a lot from building this a few times

So.. a modern Slackware?

No. Slackware comes with precompiled packages. I, however, like to recompile some.