Pulseaudio was also replaced relatively quickly by pipewire. lets check that, shall we:

PipeWire: Initial release 20 June 2017; 6 years ago source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PipeWire

PulseAudio: Initial release 17 July 2004; 19 years ago source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio

so "relatively quickly" is a time span of 13 years in your idea… or the difference between 2004 and 2017.

if that's your level of detail… your whole "rant" is worthless…

But lets be generous and look into it,

init scripts were so simple they could be understood just by looking at the name

this is blatantly false, for the old system you need to know about runlevels, what they mean, how the half backed init annotations work, and its dependency check works.

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          myrec
# Required-Start:    $all
# Required-Stop:
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:
# Short-Description: your description here
### END INIT INFO

you needed special tools to watch if an application actually was running and not crashed, and to keep it running.

add to that that the difference between systemd.service file and a sysv / init / initd script is more or less the same complexity (just different standards).

the universal format for log files was plain text false, the universal format for logging was plain text…

which is currently (slowly) getting replaced with structured logging. (which is objectively better, imho). there are a number of different log formats, most use a binary (compressed) format. logging to plain text was generally only used for the most recent log entries. a binary format for logging, as long as there's is tooling to get it to a (structured) textual output, is better than a pure text log. I mean, if its good enough for MySQL / MariaDB it ought to be good enough for you…