There's limited grounds for this to not be a disingenuous argument. Systemd is not well described as an init system. It is a service management system, which ha

There's limited grounds for this to not be a disingenuous argument. Systemd is not well described as an init system. It is a service management system, which handles transitions in system state, including (but not limited to) init and shutdown. The reason why systemd is considered a large change is because sysvinit had fundamental defects in its ability to manage processes. Cgroups were as I recall only one of several attempts to introduce improvements to the Linux kernel features, following the example of other Unixes. It's not quite correct to say that systemd was designed without regard to backwards compatibility, but it is intended to be a relatively clean break. One might say that systemd is a modern "init" system with some backwards-compatible elements, and OpenRC is more of a backwards-compatible system with some modern features. I've generally had a positive impression of the systemd developers' ability to design systems, and to communicate those designs. In most cases, I do not disagree with the choices they have made. There have been a few errors, and there is a great deal of bad blood. I think both that the software is generally good, and that there's nothing wrong with informed criticism.