I am not seeing a decent list of alternatives. Here [1] is a list of alternatives if people wish to exclude systemd for whatever reason. It appears someone compromised this wiki based on the top and bottom of the page. Here [2] is the version without the casino links.

There are also a handful of sites that show how to make systemd leaner such as disabling units that are not required, not desired or that are measured as being slow via the "systemd-analyze blame" command but I will just include the alternatives. Just keep in mind some services that are slow also run in the background. e.g.

    52.896s cachyos-rate-mirrors.service
     4.752s dev-tpm0.device
     4.752s sys-devices-platform-MSFT0101:00-tpm-tpm0.device
     4.628s sys-devices-platform-MSFT0101:00-tpmrm-tpmrm0.device
     4.628s dev-tpmrm0.device
     2.417s chronyd.service

[2] - http://archive.today/KCcXc [clean version]