What a peculiar thing to say. The init process does almost nothing -- it just spawns getty processes and launches /etc/rc. On FreeBSD, init.c is a mere 1737 lines of code. For all practical purposes init is just a boot loader; the important parts all come later.
init (the process) != init (the system), but you're right about the terminology, of course.
I'll grant that LSB sysvinit scripts aren't the easiest on the eyes, but they're hardly the shining example of what a scripted init system can look like. OpenBSD's rc scripts are far more elegant and just as featureful, IMHO.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/etc/rc.subr?view=markup
Those scripts are completely different between SysV, old-style BSD, and BSD rc.d.
I agree that SysV init scripts tend to be a jumbled mess, but they could be replaced with the rc.d framework without throwing out init entirely.
/lib/systemd/system is identical to /etc/rc.d in terms of maintenance complexity