Zero of the major distros used System V init by default. Probably only distros like Slackware or Linux From Scratch even suggested it.
It's unfortunate that so many folks uncritically swallowed the Systemd Cabal's claims about how they were the first to do this, that, or the other.
(It's also darkly amusing to note that every service that has nontrivial pre-start or post-start configuration and/or verification requirements ends up using systemd to run at least one shell script... which is what would have often been inlined into their init script in other init systems.)
