APIs generally don’t need many alternatives, only implementations do. There’s no reason devs should be trying to provide init files in multiple formats. If the systemd team actually did something bad, then people could just make a different implementation of systemd without requiring a different format for init files. Arguing for more init systems is like saying we need more APIs to compete with both Wayland and X11, instead of just talking about implementations of those protocols.

This is my argument. Do init. Don't pull in literally everything else because you think you know better, like system logging.