But in this case, there were extensive technical talks over multiple distributions.

Debian is probably the best example of how the options were pitted against each other with systemd then winning on its merits.

And what happened if one of those scripts failed?

How did your express a dependency of a service on data being mounted?

Did you ever have to face debugging failing networking via scripts?

Except it is clearly written by someone who just despises it, and doesn’t really know what they are talking about.

Init scripts were awful… they varied by distro and frequently were the source of odd problems.

There’s a good reason the Linux industry moved away from them to other ways to handle initialisation of the system and service management.