tl;dr: systemd isn't meant to be an init system, it's meant to manage services, and the alternative world where you don't have a unified system for managing services and events actually sucks.
> systemd isn't meant to be an init system, it's meant to
embrace and extinguish unix philosophy.
> the alternative world where [] actually sucks.
You should bear in mind that there are plenty of people here on HN who have had the experience of running pre-systemd unixes and they know exactly how much "the alternative world" sucked. Spoiler: not much.
I was in college when you were born. And managed thousands of pre-systemd instances including a vast zoo of unixes which were long gone by the time systemd ate the world. You're wrong.
Good for you, I'm simply saying that my feelings on the superiority of systemd are informed by having used linux before systemd was around, whereas you insinuated that I had not.
tl;dr: systemd isn't meant to be an init system, it's meant to manage services, and the alternative world where you don't have a unified system for managing services and events actually sucks.