> who don't bother understanding the thing they're annoyed about

This is the root cause of the problem. Regular initd + rc scripts are simple enough to be understood by everybody, which systemd is too complex to understand in the limited time we have. There is no "systemd senior developer" or "systemd solutions architect" positions for systemd developers, to adjust investment into systemd ecosystem.

We can easily replace initd by something much more powerful, like perl, javascript, python, java + spring, Emacs, or even Firefox or Eclipse in headless mode. They all are able to read configuration files and launch new processes. But (almost) nobody does so, because they are hard to debug and have very large surface.