Systemd is a huge improvement for sure. There's some effort involved in understanding new things, and this is one which has ultimately made our lives much easier. I say this as someone who maintains the OS for a large AWS deployment and has made the effort the understand it rather than run away in irrational fear.

I've been managing all my application daemons with supervisord across systems for this reason - it's agnostic as to the underlying init system, can restart crashed daemons, and provides the same kind of "service up/down" functionality as sysv or systemd. Systemd can do quite a lot, but if you have to do any kind of orchestration across nonhomogenous machines, you can't necessarily count on it being in play.

The nice thing about systemd is that it works the same across various Linux distros (unlike even sysvinit!). So I've been solving this problem by pushing everyone to upgrade to a version that supports systemd. :-)

I would really like to see something UI-compatible with systemd that works on non-Linux, though.

Yeah ditto, avoided Amazon Linux for ages since I didn't want to replace my .service files with shell scripts, forever/monit etc, and logging to 'local4'.