Oh, well now that you've called me a liar I suppose I have no choice but to agree with you. (/s)

Here, let's have a worked example!

https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/tree/main/nginx/nginx.ini...

In that entire file, there is exactly one function that exceeds 3 lines; the "upgrade" command, which AFAIK doesn't exist in systemd-land.

> That theoretically is a disadvantage but practically ~90% of the systemd scripts are "point at binary, pick user, group and work dir" and entirely trivial to understand; distro ones often are a bit fancier with limiting app capabilities but those are far harder to do in init script in the first place.

Partially true; I'll happily agree that 90% of daemons are the simple case. Of course, that's true regardless of the service manager in play; 90% of systemd service files are trivial, and 90% of initscripts are trivial. I'll also agree that there's an advantage to making the easy stuff common; if I were actually writing initscripts for a distro I'd have them start by including a library (probably `. /etc/init.d/_common.sh` or something like that) and then most of them would also just define the ~3 needed variables and use the default function implementations. And it would still be easier to follow than a compiled version.