As an experienced sysadmin that's a really sweeping claim to toss out without details or supporting evidence — the latter being especially important given the amount of hyperbole bandied about.
The next largest SysV replacement was Upstart, which solved many problems but had curious oversights (e.g. restart with a delay or backoff, needing many releases before adding stdout/ stderr logging or launching as a user other than root), and SMF/launchd which weren't compelling enough to overcome their respective platforms’ drawbacks. Yes, you can install alternate init systems or run things under something like supervisord but supporting that was quite tedious compared to a solid standard init.
As a software developer, being able to target one init system which has all of the features I need and no real drawbacks is similarly a very nice change from the past needing to support variants for each major Linux distribution while wishing they'd hit feature-parity with Windows NT 3.1 (1993!).
The fact that every major Linux distribution has adopted systemd suggests that whatever reintroduced issues aren't gross exaggerations aren't as important as claimed; similarly, the features commonly dismissed as unnecessary inevitably turn out to be useful to part of the larger Linux community even if a particular detractor doesn't share those needs.
