> Also, the organizations that somehow couldn’t figure out how to use and maintain traditional init systems were the ones that produced the current generation replacements and pushed them so hard.

This is revisionist. The organizations that built the current generation were those who had to support those who couldn't figure out how to use and maintain "traditional" init systems. Distro init scripts were (usually, and at great effort) decent, whether from Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, etc. (just don't ask too hard about why they were different). But the third-party (often, but not exclusively, proprietary) software vendors looking to support even a single distro were godawful. Eventually the support burden for e.g. Red Hat got large enough it made more sense to replace it wholesale than keep mentoring the latest batch of e.g. Oracle interns in how to write half-decent shell scripts.