A few of the authors of one of the Debian based distributions dropping systemd are friends of mine and all of them see things in that way, that the good old init is fine and there is no need to replace it. In the Facebook group where they use to stay the others I don't know first-hand seem to share this POV.

Nearly every systemd-disliking person I've personally spoken to, has trotted out that exact line about sysV init being fine.

It's not just a strawman, unfortunately. I wish it were.

And yet basically no alternative to systemd was produced by any of those people.

Does upstart not count as an alternative?

Upstart is older then systemd and it was mainly developed by Ubuntu who dropped it. After that is continued to exist as a project but its basically not used anywhere and id didn't continue to develop all that much.

I didn't mean to imply that it was built as a competitor to systemd, more that it exists as a different alternative. I'm aware of what happened with Ubuntu dropping it, and I think it's a shame, as I like it as a simple response to the problem.

Is upstart better in any way?

Upstart doesn't include implementations on NTP, DNS, DHCP, or anything that opens a network port. It does however allow parallel boots with dependency analysis for quick boots.

Systemd on the other hand seems to be trying to take over syslog, ntpd, dhcpd, named, and related with generally poorer implementations. Feature creep seems constant with systemd, for no particularly good reason.