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Poorly designed security architecture and division of labor. A more idealized init / systemd would have all of the execution flow of PID 1 mathematically provably correct, and correspondingly have as small a footprint as possible there. All additional functions would run under one or more child processes (where the bulk of systemd would execute).

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"Lets put the graphics drivers in ring 0, for better performance!" -- Windows NT architects, 1996

"Ummm, lets not do that, it's not such a great idea..." -- Windows Vista team, 2006

Different trade offs for different eras and different constraints.

Initial Windows NT uses user mode graphic driver, then NT 4.0 move it kernel mode.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions//cc750820...

Yep. In about '96.

(Well, it came out late '96, so I suppose a bunch of that was actually done in '95.)

Systemd is a swiss-army-kitchen-sink-knife monolith of brittle complexity.

A proper init system similar to runit or s6 would be written in something safer (minimum unsafe) like Rust, be modular, simpler, follow UNIX philosophy, and not try to do everything in one process. Microkernel-style.

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