The problem is that badly written init scripts are reasonably easy to debug and make work, even if it's often ugly, while systemd is not a good enough replaceme

The problem is that badly written init scripts are reasonably easy to debug and make work, even if it's often ugly, while systemd is not a good enough replacement to just make all those problems a thing of the past, so you still have to debug stuff occasionally and try to make it work somehow, which just is so much harder due to the way systemd works. It's a bit like ISA vs. ISA PnP vs. PCI. Jumpering ISA cards to make sure resources didn't conflict was a bit of a chore and sometimes difficult to get right, but essentially there always was a way. ISA PnP tried to automate this, which was great if it worked, but more often than not just failed, and then you had no jumpers to fall back on to just fix things up manually (though sometimes you had special config utilities that with some luck you could use to fix things up with some cards ... maybe). PCI, though, was an actual reliable abstraction that actually worked essentially all the time, so there actually was no use for jumpers, so it is fine that PCI cards don't have IRQ/IO jumpers. Systemd seems to me like the ISA PnP of init systems.