Also, things are constantly being rethought. That is quite literally what the churn encompasses. You can't complain about this while asking for it at the same time. I have seen all these lists of other init systems and while they are interesting, they are completely missing where the actual discussions are happening and what is actually being discussed. The core problem has already moved to a different area and that's why it really doesn't matter if they are doing a bad job. I can see you hinting at this in your article but it's not good to dwell so much on things that happened in the past and are already history. I am very grateful that you actually quoted all your sources though, so thank you for that.

The comparison of init to HAL seems not relevant to me; if anything that has made it obvious that they had the right idea but it was in the wrong place, and that init was the right place to put this type of logic after all. Adding to that it also seems very unlikely that the kernel developers will change their position on the responsibilities of an init any time soon.

And about the idiomatic way to daemonize, nobody follows those guides. Nobody. Seriously. It's a complete clusterfuck and writing more guides doesn't help either. There are an absurd number of programs out there that still use pidfiles. Go and do a search on github for "pidfile" and be horrified.