I don’t necessarily like sysvinit: systemd is just a monster slowly gobbling up all sorts of functionality that’s not directly related to “initializing the system”.
Initializing a system is a very complex problem.
And that systemd gobbles up unrelated things is simply FUD. Systemd is both an init system and a group of many related projects. So it’s a bit like saying plasma is all-encompassing because they have a desktop env and also a pdf viewer file manager etc. They are just under the same name, not mandatory, similarly to many systemd programs.