The browser based apps really don’t feel like alternatives. Scrolling in Excel 365 is particularly painful and it doesn’t seem to have the full range of functions and graph creation tools etc

Systemd has more features than old SysV init scripts. Particularly around detecting events and taking actions such as starting firewalls when joining networks, turning on battery tools when unplugged from a charger, starting new services when connected to a dock etc.

The other things it does, it does more reliably than sysV init scripts. It starts services concurrently, provides a profiler to improve start up time, contains much less code, provides better security to tapping into the container features of Linux.