[Surio]

This whole init vs systemd has been a very divisive (and ongoing) debate, and both sides feel very strongly on their particular stance. Just look up the pages that come up for a "init vs systemd" search on the net.

From what I see on the devuan page, in the spirit of FOSS, the people that prefer to keep init as part of their setup, have forked debian into devuan, and propose to retain the "init based debian", for people that prefer init scripts.

That's the shortest summary I could come up with for you.

Another short writeup by @tinco https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9094142