FTFY
systemd might be sad but makes the simple case simple. sysvinit makes everything complex and error prone.
To his, credit he is reactive until he decides the issue is not worth his time.
To his discredit, he made himself into a giant bottleneck. Random systemd users can not easily understand it.
Where you had ultimate responsibility for the correct operation of the box and any VMs or services that it ran?
The reason I ask, is that despite running many more non-systemd than systemd boxes over the past 22 years, I have had far more time taken up by systemd issues than issues with other init script systems. And that includes Solaris both sysV and SMF based.
The SysV init scripts weren't good, they were crufty and slow, and messy when you wanted to customize something, and -- this doesn't get said enough -- used no Linux-specific features at all. Systemd was an upgrade that was sorely needed, and brought features to the init system that just didn't exist before.
* made debugging a random system a lot more straight forward
* made putting up software for packaging a lot easier
* made customizing the start-up of a daemon a lot easier (this ties in with the first point)
* made it so I didn't have to go to the guru who's only job seemed to be managing our obtuse set of init scripts that were extra baroque because order of startup really mattered.
That guy I had to go to - he was an asshole an lorded his knowledge of arcana over anyone who brought him a question. I'm 90% sure he made it intentionally complex since he didn't have much skill beyond memorizing those silly facts (this is the same guy who got an entire project reassigned to me because he couldn't understand the concept of functions when I removed some extreme repetition from a python script he wrote). Most of the systemd haters remind me of this guy.
I guess what you're implying is that he helped automate away dead weight and that made the leeches mad?