I'd argue using an OS and init system with significantly less support compared to Linux is more likely to have a lot more reasons to hold you back.

There are non-systemd linux distros like alpine and gentoo. With elogind and such, you can run gnome and such without systemd.

I've run Gentoo since 2004, and all the non-stop compiling has finally driven me away from that distro. It's just too much of a waste of time, a drain on my system's resources and wear on my disks.

It used to be bearable back in the day, but now software has gotten so bloated that compiling it all constantly is just ridiculous... especially on older, slower systems.

I agree. Gentoo ought to have better binpkgs support. Alpine is a nice alternative, albeit it doesn't have USE flags.

We swapped linux for FreeBSD in one of our classrooms at $WORK. It just works.

why not just use another init system? I've had great experiences with runit, and they say s6 is good as well.

It's not so easy to ditch systemd on a lot of distros, because it's tied so closely in to everything else.

Also, I don't know about you but I don't want to waste my time writing init scripts for every application I run that needs them. I'd much rather just use a distro that has already written them for me.