[cookiengineer]

I am not sure whether or not you are aware that some might intepret your comment as survivor's bias. Not everybody is a sysadmin, and definitely not everybody wants to do those tedious tasks in /etc.

There are so many potential pitfalls of everything around init/initd, especially if downstream integration scripts have to keep up with upstream changes.

And I would argue that those should not be the burden of endusers, and also not be the burden of distro maintainers. Providing a settings file that can autolaunch your application in a failsafe manner for all distributions is where systemd shines at, like it or not.

While I agree that it isn't perfect and the debugging critiques are kind of valid, I also would argue that this can be solved with better (graphical) tools for the systemd ecosystem.

Also: if you assume that debugging a broken shell script (running as root) is easier than systemd, then your perspective is already biased, cause it's a skill set that requires lots of experience.

I mean, most shell scripts in /etc/init.d don't even set -e, let alone -u ... and should be considered a risk for system integrity.