etcd never was simple. if you wanted simple, there was redis or memcached. it's an arbitrary cutoff to call etcd simple (it implements Raft, for fuck's sake,

etcd never was simple. if you wanted simple, there was redis or memcached. it's an arbitrary cutoff to call etcd simple (it implements Raft, for fuck's sake, it implies a distributed system, multiple odd number of nodes to avoid split-brain!) systemd is simple, fixed config format, comes with every distro, default works, has extensive documentation, compared to undocumented distro-specific init scripts written in sh (or bash, or worse). sure, if someone just wants to hack on their 8bit toaster, then they might find a simple shell script simpler. but the post is not lamenting that.