Upstart did all those things without needing to worm it's way through the whole system like systemd does. You're mistaking people's dislike for systemd with a

Upstart did all those things without needing to worm it's way through the whole system like systemd does. You're mistaking people's dislike for systemd with a love of sysv init - no-one liked sysv init and everyone wanted a change. It's just that systemd has taken a very broad remit, plus the maintainers have a 'fuck your use-case' attitude.