I'm not sure it's necessarily a better solution as it requires more manual interaction out of the box (namely creating symlinks by hand among other duties), but that might be argued as a feature. There appears to be a wrapper or two out there to automate away some of the tedium.
runit, s6 and also nosh are all daemontool-style init systems, which have a somewhat different idea how to do things than systemd all, but all are inspired by the original daemontools package.
s6 and nosh have decent overviews:
https://skarnet.org/software/s6/ https://jdebp.eu/Softwares/nosh/guide/introduction.html
The original daemontools: https://cr.yp.to/daemontools/faq/create.html#why
I'll let others decide whether these are better or worse than systemd. I go with whatever my distro would give me, since picking a different init system is too much work...