More like people have had perfectly usable alternatives but now the hivemind is more or less forcing something else onto them. I don't need to build a new init system, I have one that works, thank you. Please don't give me systemd.
But yeah, it is being blamed for bloating init, because for one thing, cron isn't init's job. And that's just the start.
Which is why other platforms started moving from cron to init years ago?
OS X:
> Note: Although it is still supported, cron is not a recommended solution. It has been deprecated in favor of launchd. [1]
Solaris:
> cron has had a long reign as the arbiter of scheduled system tasks on Unix systems. However, it has some critical flaws that make its use somewhat fraught. [...] cron also lacks validation, error handling, dependency management, and a host of other features. [...] The Periodic Restarter is a delegated restarter, at svc:/system/svc/periodic-restarter:default, that allows the creation of SMF services that represent scheduled or periodic tasks. [2]
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Ma...
[2]: https://blogs.oracle.com/SolarisSMF/entry/cron_begone_predic...
However, the other points I've made are still correct and accurate.
Edit: here's a great example from one of the links in the other comment:
suckless complaining about "sysv removed" in systemd. Link takes you to this changelog entry:
"The support for SysV and LSB init scripts has been removed from the systemd daemon itself. Instead, it is now implemented as a generator that creates native systemd units from these scripts when needed. This enables us to remove a substantial amount of legacy code from PID 1, following the fact that many distributions only ship a very small number of LSB/SysV init scripts nowadays."
So, code was removed from the init daemon itself and moved into a standalone utility that does one specific job.
Systemd is now both being blamed for bloating init, and for splitting functionality out into a separate tool that does one thing.