I agree with you; my entire point that they were sysv with bolt-on features was to say that many of the alternate init systems really weren't very advanced and spent too much effort trying to replicate sysv for compatibility reasons when the entire thing should have been scrapped.

Anyway, I think the pro-systemd folks often think that anti-systemd folks would react the same way to any init system that isn't sysv. This is probably fair, because there haven't been many credible non-systemd alternatives to sysv.