Reading many comments such as this makes me wonder about the competencies and attention spans of current generations of sysadmins, as if reading and understanding shell scripts is such a difficult task.

Especially when I hear people complain about how hard it is to debug a shell script. Do these people really think that moving from readable and traceable (set -x) shell scripts to a declarative language makes things easier to debug?

These people wouldn't by any change happen to be the same people as those complaining that make, a declarative language, is too hard to understand, maintain and debug and that it needs to be replaced by some complex substitute that claims to simplify things and attempts to hide complexity by reducing flexibility?

To elaborate, init is not doing nothing, it is providing some essential services:
it provides an attachment point to the kernel for orphaned child processes that would otherwise end up outside of the tree.
it performs essential resource cleanup for orphaned zombie processes, among other things allowing reuse of the PID by future processes.

This is a tangent, but comparing this response with the typical systemd response yields some insight on both the perceived arrogance of Monsanto and the conjectured hidden agenda of systemd. We'll call this kind of response the 'systemd defense'