Cpupower (linux-cpupower package) is the natural replacement for cpufrequtils and it seems capable of autoloading governors alone. I think all we need is a systemd service and a sample config file for it, as provided by cpufrequtils.
See my own wish report on it: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=894906 Also see the way Arch does this: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/linux-tools
