That's very fair. Having managed system services for custom application stacks with hard dependencies on one another, that strength is worth it to me.

I don't mean to come across as saying that the Unix philosophy is wrong. Just horses for courses. Systems where there is a likelihood of interdependent daemons should probably consider systemd. Where that's not an issue or complexity is low, more Unix-like inits can still be a solid choice because of their limited scoping and easy modification.