On the sickness of our community

Sometimes when you're writing code and you do something new, and a whole set of assumptions that were baked into the old code no longer make sense. I think this has happened repeatedly: one, because init and startup is so central to how the overall system works, and two, because there is a huge amount of baggage that has built up over Unix's lifetime, actually not baggage but just no-longer-correct assumptions about amount of needed flexibility or about the resources on a system. The initial systemd fixed one, but there were a LOT more (and still are).

So many things we hold as foundational about Linux/Unix are actually accidents, or bugs-that-became-features. (see /usr -> /home transition, and dotfiles not showing up in ls). The reason that distros keep adopting it is even as new and possibly-buggy-in-corners, it does more, in less code and complexity overall than what it replaces, and if a problem is found it's going to be fixed.