[rleigh]

I'm not in any way appealing to a "mythical golden age". I'm simply pointing out that the whole Linux world ran this way for over two decades without this being a critical problem, or even a problem of particular note.

Not only that, but automated service restarting was configurable if desired, albeit not the default. If you wanted it, it was doable with ease. This is not a new feature which systemd brought to the table, it was already available.

[astine]

The sentence: Firstly, because they used to be written sufficiently well that they never crashed, because competent people wrote them. IS an appeal to a golden age. Because it's not true. People did write services that crashed and sysadmins had to work around them. I know this to be the case because I had to work with a particularly egregious example. Whether you think the older methods for managing them were better is one thing, but those problems existed and they caused lots of damage.