https://xkcd.com/277/

Same thing with cars that were designed in the 1960s before we had to worry about things like emissions and crash safety.

Sysvinit is great up until you have a use case that it winds up sucking for. Most people don't hit that problem, or don't realize that their high level problem (correctly handling something being hotswapped probably) requires better integration than that.

They're also pissing and moaning without any solution that addresses all the requirements, and just use "Desktop" and "Enterprise" like they're slurs rather than what should be tablestakes.

And I wrote some truly awful code 10 years ago dealing with an abstraction layer built over the dozen different service managers than existed back then (upstart, runit, etc, etc). I'm quite happy that my code turned out to all be ultimately quite useless overdesign in retrospect and systemd just took over everything. It was a mess back then.