systemd 246 released

Perhaps OpenRC might be more appropriate for your use case? Several interesting projects use it. (e.g. Alpine Linux, Gentoo) My reasoning here is that if you want a startup and service management approach, but don't need the complexity of SystemD, you may need a mechanism that's a sort of half-way mark between bare SysV-init scripts and SystemD. You could think of OpenRC as SysV-init with "batteries included" - lots of helper functions to assist, but not dictate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRC

Don't hate me for suggesting it - I don't know your actual use case. :) Cheers!