I honestly don't understand the visceral hate for systemd.
It is the antithesis of the Unix way. This has been argued back and forth all along, and if you don't agree I won't try to convince you here.
Systemd, at least in my experience, just works and writing systemd unit files is easier than writing sysvinit scripts. So when Debian switched to it, it was fine. I adapted.
The problem with systemd and unit scripts is that they cannot do all the things that a script can do, so you often wind up using a script anyway. In that case you have really not made things any simpler than the usual case. Meanwhile you've added a whole lot of complexity which is largely unnecessary, some of which is utterly dependent on other parts so it is difficult to impossible to switch out portions of it, and much of which doesn't work very well. systemd is arguably better at typical run time logging but is worse at early boot logging, which is what got me to drop it. I was having problems with root on zfs on Debian, which had been working, and I couldn't tell what had happened without a debugger. So I switched to Devuan.
In fact I just did a fresh install of Devuan excalibur (Debian trixie) with root on zfs from the trixie instructions on the openzfs site, where I had a dumb problem with grub which I solved in a hacky way by dropping a script into grub.d (the script which creates the root= part of the cmdline doesn't detect the pool the root volume is on correctly) and also had to do an init script in place of their .service file. It took me about 45 seconds to whack a related init script into what I needed and add it to the boot sequence.
When Debian switched to systemd, I adapted. I switched to Devuan.