devfs is not gone

Yes.

Or to put it more succinctly, "sda" name is not matter of policy, but "MyFavoriteDrive" is, as are the by-uuid and by-path symlinks, ownership, permissions, and acls.

> No coherent rationale that I can see was ever given for removing not only
> the requirement but even the possibility of creating /dev nodes from
> udev. Sure, on huge systems you want the kernel to do it, because it does
> it very fast -- but on normal systems, the extra flexibility seems
> worthwhile.
The reason is consistency (we want the same capabilities and mechanisms on all systems) and simplicity (we don't want to carry an alternate implementation if the kernel already provides one) and a minimal increase in safety (if udev does not create nodes, it cannot screw them up).