Legible, discoverable, debuggable. They listed the commands the computer needed to run, in the order it needed to run them, to get the system running. It was absolutely beautiful. And then LSB came along and broke it, and as a result of that systemd now manages my home directory and cron tables. Shame, really.
When I first tried linux on the late 2000s, this was a major selling point. Something not working right? Oh neat I can actually investigate and fix or replace it instead of just having to live with it. Nowadays I'm not sure I'd see the advantage as a new user and may not bother even trying it out.
I could actually see systemd killing the whole year-of-linux-on-the-desktop thing not even because it's worse in any way, but because as time goes on the major distinguishing factors from other OSes are disappearing, so there's no longer reason for people to try it out.
You could install new hardware. Or worse — uninstall hardware.
Although that breaks systemd as well due to renaming all of your network interfaces because one Lennart Pottering continues to insist that desktop motherboards all work a certain way despite the evidence directly in front of his eyes.
Systems were simpler then and demands were lower. So what if the system boots sequentially and takes two days to boot up. But try to make it parallel and faster, and the whole house of scripts falls down or becomes illegible, undiscoverable and completely unmaintainable mess.
I wasn't talking about your system, I was talking about many systems everywhere. Just as an example, one of them may be powering your home internet and fast and reliable systemd boot is one of the reasons why multiple minutes had been saved on a hardware power cycle and service downtime.
Regardless of my opinion, this choice has been done by much more knowledgeable people and results are clear. Personally, I would pick a systemd distro any time over script init based.
