Runit is / was awesome but how is this news?
Instead, the way it was presented in public is that the Linux distros had been battling with brittle sysvinit scripts (true, but also largely self-inflicted) for so long until systemd came in to heroically save the day.
It was pretty shocking to watch how the scene evolved from apathy to having an urgent problem that must be solved now.
Upstart didn't come about until later from many of the alternatives I listed, and its origins were mostly in response to launchd. It was quite rudimentary initially. [1]
My first encounter with the existence of systemd was while keeping half an eye on the whole consolekit+polkit+udisk rigamarole i apparently needed to get thunar (or more correctly gvfs) to automount stuff.
This when i learned that consolekit was to be replaced with logind, and logind required systemd as init.
That, to me, was a very WTF moment. It basically made a file manager dependent on a specific init being used.