Service restart has been a solved problem in UNIX for over 40 years. It is called inetd. It is not perfect, and it was originally created for a slightly different operating model, but it does restart crashed «services». They are, in fact, called daemons. Shell scripts are for manual service starts, stops and restarts (when the daemon does not support a restart on SIGHUP), they are not meant for the automated service restarts.

Different UNIX systems have gone on to replace inetd to address specific shortcomings of the inetd model with launchd, service management facility, systemd, SAM, but the service restart is not an innovation that systemd has brought along. It is a further, fine-grained, improvement over a decade old concept and a tool + ecosystem that has implemented the concept (inetd + rc scripts).

If your service crashes, either your service or your build sucks.

OpenBSD does this stuff right. You keep pushing faulty and buggy crap over and over.

SysV-RC handles all that apart from socket activation, which is the job of inetd. This is all before systemd.

I must say that now it has more features and the configuration format, while could be simpler, is way better than sysvrc magic comments. I'd suggest it should be XML with a simple config file equivalent for simple cases, as the subtree update in YAML-like is a hell anyway.