For production systems, I started more than a quarter of century ago with FreeBSD, which at that time was still much more stable and more performant than any Linux variant.

Even then, the init scripts system of FreeBSD was much better than the traditional sysvinit. I have never ever had the slightest problem with it, since then until today, when I still run a mixture of Linux and FreeBSD servers.

In the following years, many features of the FreeBSD software package system and of its init scripts system have become available in some Linux distributions, especially in Gentoo.

I have never used in production any variant of the traditional sysvinit, while with the improved versions from FreeBSD, Gentoo and a few others I have never seen any difficulty and no feature that could have been improved by the use of systemd.

In my opinion, the way to an optimal init scripts system has been shown by Daniel J. Bernstein with his "daemontools", which I have also been using continuously 24/7 for more than a quarter of a century, for some essential services, on many servers.

Today, there are a few new init scripts systems that have been inspired by the DJB daemontools, and I think that one of them could become the best choice in the future.