Right but you never see what it's actually doing like you do with sysv. You have a high-level description of what you want to happen and when it messes up (invariably at 3am, invariably on a mission-critical system) you're completely in the dark about what it's trying to do. You can (and people do) mitigate this by just writing imperative startup scripts that systemd calls, but then that leaves the question of what the point is.
Managing services and dependencies and orchestrating all of that is the point. That orchestration “boilerplate” has to be correct and you can reasonably know that it is with a program made for that. If you mess up your service’s config, the problem will be local (your service won’t start), while without a declarative stance your whole system would be in an inconsistent state.
Wait, no; you're describing the exact opposite of what happens. If a sysv init script gets messed up that service fails and the system trundles on. When a unit file is wrong the whole server just sits there refusing to do anything while it waits for 30 seconds, them 90, then 120...
OpenRC is closer to systemd than sysv in that regard, though at least it logs sanely
> while it waits for 30 seconds, them 90, then 120...
That depends on how it’s configured, but that is the correct behavior under the given config. You can specify timeouts, or what depends on what and most of it is sane.
For example, what would be the logical thing to do with a server that has no internet connection? You can only wait for that.
