> it never simplified anything, especially with the huge amount of dependencies[...]

That's an odd way of looking at things. Ultimately it's software accomplishing task X. How are things simpler if instead of depending on other projects they'd have implemented those things on their own? Then you'd be carrying duplicate work.

> [...]but in the end of the day each distro has to maintain their own .service files anyway.

Sure, but e.g. on Debian /etc/systemd/system/sshd.service is 22 lines. The still-carried shellscript version is 162 lines, and that's before counting any of the per-distro shellscript libraries systemd removed the need for. That's a big reduction in complexity even if systemd didn't have any advantages over shellscript init, which it does.