The fact that I still have yet to see any such examples in the last half a decade seems pretty telling. Wouldn't and shouldn't there be tons of such examples given the rhetoric?
I worked on a system that (among other things) packaged up a Linux system as a network appliance. The device ran multiple daemons. I have built similar things before in a SysV world, and systemd made the following things easy:
* Starting each daemon only when the system resources it needed (e.g. network up) were ready
* Starting the daemons in the right order relative to each other
* Putting daemon log output in syslog
* Restarting when crashed (for those where it was appropriate)
These all required only a few lines of systemd config, and no special coding in the application. For instance, logging was just printing to stdout/stderr and systemd took care of the rest.
You can also manage much more complex dependency situations (like two services being dependent on each other and requiring a restart of both if one crashes).
Systemd Timers are also much more robust and predictable than piling scripts on top of cron, I use them extensively for managing backups on both servers and desktops with automatic reporting for failures.
* http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8488235)
* https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/
* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/run-scripts-and-service-units-side-by-s...
... and then calling the latter "System V init", when AT&T System V had actually adopted a new system with separate system and service management several years before Linux was even invented.
>and then calling the latter "System V init",
This is what everyone calls it in the context of Linux init systems. You may not like that particular piece of terminology, but please don't give me a hard time for following the standard usage.
Then you are unable to distinguish singulars from plurals.
Having written and dealt with both; It's about equal in my time and effort to write either in sh or windows ini/'unit' files.
System V init wasn't an ancient straw man for Debian users. It was the init system that systemd replaced.
The alternative approach is to use supervisord - it also have service descriptors and does what systemd does. The last time we tried to use it(rhed6 had no systemd) we found it lacking some options important to us.
Yes, it's telling; it suggests you've had your fingers deliberately in your ears for five years.
Maybe systemd is not objectively better or worse. But I'm at least glad there is a standard among Linux systems so I only have to learn the quirks of one init system.
Unit files are much more declarative and self-contained compared to a bash script. And the bonus is that if you need/still want to use bash, you can do so in systemd.