Possibly it's because initscripts were such a painful experience that they weren't used as extensively. I find myself making systemd units often for small thing

Possibly it's because initscripts were such a painful experience that they weren't used as extensively. I find myself making systemd units often for small things that I wouldn't have wanted to write a whole initscript for. Just the dependency resolution features alone make it fantastic. It's only a few lines to specify a network dependency, a filesystem dependency, another service dependency, timeout and retry behaviors, monitoring and alerting on failures, etc. Plus it goes beyond just init. The scheduling features mean I'm turning to it instead of something like cron for doing repeated tasks on a server. Again, there's just a bunch of quality-of-life improvements there, like dependencies, better and more granular logging, error reporting, retries with limits, etc.