Playing devil's advocate: system init by itself is easy, just have a single script starting each daemon in sequence, like it was done in the distant past (IIRC, "init" started both the getty for each terminal, and ran a single startup script). It's the "service restart, logging, dependency management" part that's complicated. And unfortunately, since nowadays devices are often hot-pluggable, you can't really escape from the "dependency management" part.

It's not. Read the shell scripts that openbsd uses to init. Simple, straightforward, easy to understand.

I read your comment more as a tribute to the excellent work of the OpenBSD team than a denial of the thesis of the complexity of the init process.

>> You can’t create a simple solution for that, since there is an inherent complexity.

They didn't bury the complexity, they removed it. And I agree, that's hard to do. It'd be nice if the systemd folks put in the same effort to remove the complexity from their system.