Let me interject for a moment, but what you guys are referring to as fun, is in fact, GNU/fun, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus fun. Fun is not a thing unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system.

That's because systemd is a mild editor lacking a decent lisp os

The "not portable" thing is actually such a weird point. Every other non-linux OS had its own pid 1, none of them identical to the sysvinit package formerly used by Linux distros. (though some of them quite similar) So I don't think you could really claim the thing systemd replaces needed to support the BSDs or anything. Because it did not.

In some cases you might reuse rc.d scripts across multiple OSs... But rc.d itself was not "a thing" everywhere.