[Author here]
> The virtue of Sysv init is its transparency.
Personally, as a former sysadmin type myself, I never found that. I always found the BSD init system made more sense to me.
A lot of people say they like the SysV stuff nowadays, but Unix System V was just an earlier round of inter-vendor standardisation, keeping everyone happy by incorporating a little bit of everything into a bloated mess.
Then a few decades went by, everyone forgot this, and now it's praised for elegance and clarity.
I think that view is through rose-tinted bifocals.
It really wasn't. It was a mess then and it still is.
IMHO.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
