Except ...

My primary Linux instances are on my growing family of Raspberry PIs or equiv (I have a couple of BananaPIs and Libre boards).  It's based enough on Raspian which like Henry's line WRT 4.2, is just like Debian only different.  Frankly, dealing with those issues when you leave the fold is a huge PITA.  The problem for me, I really don't have a choice as I can not run a *BSD on them easily to do what I want to do - which is typically to control HW (like my PiDP's or a some "homecontrol" stuff I have).

As I have said, it all about economics (well and ego in this case).  You have to make something better to make it valuable.  Replacing how the system init worked always struck me as throwing out the baby with the bathwater. SysV init was not at all bad, moving from Research/BSD init to it was not a huge life.  That said, I agree with Dan, adding a resource system is a good idea and probably was a "hole."  Years ago, the CMU  Mach team created their nanny system, but it ran in cooperation with init - it did not try to replace init (remember Mach was trying to be a superset of BSD -- they had learned the lessons with Accent of being completely different).  When Apple picked up Mach, their engineers eventually combined them to create launchd - which is what I think opened up the world to "getting rid of init" and thus systemd being considered possible by some Linux folks.

Of course, the Linux developers could not settle for using launched (NIH) .... so, sadly, https://xkcd.com/927/ applies here - that's the ego part.