Sorry to redpill you, but SailfishOS has always been built on systemd and some non-trivial benefits (like a faster boot time when compared to Android) depend on it.

Jolla developers wisely chose Wayland protocol instead of the 30-year-old X11, systemd init manager over initscripts, Qt over Gtk/Gnome, because they were building a modern Linux phone, not a desktop PC, even less a server, even less a *BSD machine. And that happened even if Wayland and systemd were not yet considered - back in 2012/2013 - well-tested and feature-complete.

The systemd hate, FUD and criticism come from luddites' worst nightmares, from ancient bug-reports (especially from misconfigured/mispatched systems), and from the wrong assumption that previous methods (like the boot script files approach) give the same level of performance, safety, manageability, speed. Basically the same kind of argument when back in 1992 Linux kernel was criticized for being monolithic by the author of Minix.

Booting a system is a non-trivial task (dependencies, ordering, parallelization, logging...) and not only systemd takes care of everything in a fast, safe and sound way, it also keeps compatibility with oldschool SysV/LSB scripts and adds in quite a number of security features based on Linux kernel features (for example capabilities restrictions) without the need to patch libraries and services. The latest systemd release adds in IP traffic accounting and dynamic users, two features found in Android, also in the Android layer on your old Jolla1) that Jolla guys may apply to native apps without modifying them.

Disclaimer: I use systemd in my job. Since 2014 it saved me countless hours debugging coworkers issues (did he use a wrong userid? early start? forgot to release permissions? wrong pidfile directory? accidentally wiped /tmp? logged to a different stream? started before the network was ready?...) A number of bizarre and hard-to-catch bugs disappeared overnight as soon as I switched to systemd; we now use systemd in production on all of our servers). I bet Jolla guys just felt the same way.