@Okanogen @remenca @Viss @lcamtuf well, you can use those tools seperarely and they ain't hard-linked and you can use #systemd solely as init, tho that would negate much of the benefits beyond the more structured approach to starting daemons as services in the right order per depemdency checking...
Also whilst you may not like these tools, they do in fact solve a lot if issues in big deployments.
Once you've to handle 5-digit VM numbers and 4-digit machines across a double-digit number of locations, you'll learn to love those things because shit just works.
Also #journalctl actually spits out useful errors and tells you exactly what went wrong when a service refuses to start or crashed.
And compared to other solutions like #SMF it's way cleaner, leaner and easier to maintain a system that way...
Not to mention stuff like #pipewire actualls cleans up the mess of #ALSA, #OSS, #Jack and #Gstreamer...