Gentoo was the first distro that lead to me really understanding what was going on.

So OpenRC was "normal" for me, and when the systemd debate came around I didn't think about the fact that OpenRC wasn't the norm and folks hat been using SysV init all that time.

I'm still a Gentoo user these days (although not as heavily, the laptops are running Fedora nowadays), but running systemd. The unitfile format is really great.