[EmanueleAina]

> the fact that "OMG initscripts are so verbose with so much boilerplate; my unit files are so much better" is a commonly-cited reason for people to prefer systemd over other init systems, never mind that said reasoning is plainly false

Indeed, I agree with that. The only advantage is that the restricted syntax of unit files is more suitable for error checking rather than having the shell complain more or less randomly, but compactness is not an intrinsic advantage of it.

That said, not every distribution standardized on such kind of helpers (ie. Debian), so in those cases compactness was one of the benefits of switching to systemd (not exclusive to it).