This is over complicated to have extra binary and different method to bootstrap MariaDB
Just a quick example is our install for binary

shell> chown -R mysql .
shell> chgrp -R mysql .
shell> scripts/mysql_install_db --user=mysql
shell> chown -R root .
shell> chown -R mysql data
shell> bin/mysqld_safe --user=mysql &

It contain to many steps that overlab the job to provide a configuration file
When it comes to scripts/mysql_install_db where is this script in rpm , binary , source , oeach os may complexify any bootstrap solution that would only have to ask the path of the mysqld server to enable first install

This task would be to implement
mariadbd --bootstrap-system --user=mariadb --datadir=/var/lib/mariadb that would
where mariadb is binary and mysqld a symlink to it to keep existing compatibility with the past

--bootstrap-system would create or replace all system tables including detaching and recreating innodb system tables if needed