Go drool some more over Cantrill, will you?
The other systems still fundamentally do init's job, as well as managing services. They DON'T do everything, including:
-replace cron
-handle dynamic device files (udev's job)
-set the hostname
-replace syslog
-replace inetd
-automount
-anything I forgot
Those "traditions" you're speaking of not only are not outdated, but they never were fully realized to their ideal outside of Plan9, which attempted to make everything accessible through file APIs.
The suckless crowds are not about reproducing the original Unix. They are about carrying the torch of that philosophy, and the original unix was just the beginning, not an end in itself. Here's an example of software from suckless that follows Plan9 : http://tools.suckless.org/ii/
Those that worship Plan 9 as the UNIX culture, should actually be aware what the authors think about UNIX.
"I didn't use Unix at all, really, from about 1990 until 2002, when I joined Google. (I worked entirely on Plan 9, which I still believe does a pretty good job of solving those fundamental problems.) I was surprised when I came back to Unix how many of even the little things that were annoying in 1990 continue to annoy today. In 1975, when the argument vector had to live in a 512-byte-block, the 6th Edition system would often complain, 'arg list too long'. But today, when machines have gigabytes of memory, I still see that silly message far too often. The argument list is now limited somewhere north of 100K on the Linux machines I use at work, but come on people, dynamic memory allocation is a done deal!
I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy. "
https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...
The world isn't a PDP-11 anymore.
Sometimes shouting "UNIX philosophy" in GNU/Linux forums reminds me of emigrants that keep traditions of their home countries alive that are long out of fashion back home.