On the question of PATH for BSD land (FreeBSD, TrueOS, HardenedBSD et
al), binaries installed from packages (ports) live under /usr/local,
with the exception of /var and /tmp. The wars were fought and
/usr/local can easily be mounted read-only.
Of the 1446 packages I have installed (no desktop stuff),
the breakdown is
# ls /usr/local/bin/ | wc -l
2857
# ls /usr/local/sbin/ | wc -l
349
# find /usr/local/bin/ -type d -depth 1
/usr/local/bin/db5; # No directories under /usr/local/sbin
# ls /usr/local/libexec|wc -l
72
The placement of files, is more a "distribution" decision that I'm sure
is already settled.
On the documentation front, Laurent's work is very good, but I did find
the examples from the gentoo docset for s6 & s6-rc, a life saver for
someone with no prior process or service management background. (I'd
only used monit previously, and still do to reload application configs
and some other system state change events over s6 tools).