[yjftsjthsd-h]

I don't think that is a bad faith reading; when the original statement was (basically) "systemd is bad and overcomplicated", saying "it's not and you know it" is a bad-faith statement. And no, sysvinit was perfectly fine for most people; if anything, I could fairly describe systemd as a very specialized init system for uncommon requirements. Now, I'm happy to agree that systemd is also basically fine for the most common uses (because, honestly, the most common cases are covered by anything), but it also introduced pain points for even non-esoteric cases (I've personally witnessed systemd getting stuck in fascinating nondeterministic ways more than sysv).

[md8z]

That doesn't seem to be what most Linux distributions were thinking around 10 years ago when the upstart/systemd/openrc/etc arguments started happening. The general consensus seemed to be that sysvinit needed to be replaced, or at the very least it needed to have a ton of other scaffolding on top of it in order to make it keep working.

Sysvinit never got stuck in those cases because it never had service dependencies and thus never needed to have a constraint solver for the dependency graph... So could you honestly say that pain point was better?