> I guess all those complainers, however vocal, were neither the majority, nor the people who actually maintained distributions.

This matched my experience: there were a few vocal haters who were very loud but tended not to be professional sysadmins or shipping binaries to other people, and they didn’t have a realistic alternative. If you distributed or managed software, you had a single, robust solution for keeping daemons running with service accounts, restarts, dependencies, etc. for Windows NT circa 1993 and macOS in 2005 so Linux not having something comparable was just this ongoing source of paper cuts which caused some Linux shops to have unexpected, highly visible downtime (e.g. multiple times I saw data center outages where all of the Windows stuff and the properly configured Upstart/SystemD stuff come up after retrying but high-profile apps using SysV init stayed down for hours because the admins had to clean it up by hand).

Anyone who packaged software was also happy to stop supporting different combinations of buggy shell scripts and utilities, too – every RPM I built went from hundreds of lines of .sh to a couple dozen lines of better systemd. systemd certainly isn’t perfect but if you had an actual job to do you were going to look at systemd as the best path to reduce that overhead.