You are making the oft-made error of thinking that System 5 rc was the precursor to systemd. On several major systems it was not. The precursor was upstart on Fedora and Ubuntu, for example.
See http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ for the System 5 rc fallacy and several others to avoid.
It made all these things really easy, I'm not sure why everyone is so keen on doing everything with various bash scripts like we used to.