If you mean the repetitive spaghetti of pseudo text processing in init.d, then yes I've seen it. Everything tries to do the same stuff in a different way, there's lack of one framework, error checking is present only in random places and any script can hang because there's no real timeout handling. They're also different in almost every distribution and some are incompatible between sh/bash and very few people can tell the difference. The whole idea is one level too low and we're finally growing up to use something simpler.

That's one of my "favourite" examples of using scripting where it's not needed. Have a look at what's actually keeping critical systems working -> inittab, supervisord, etc. Lately upstart also migrated from scripts to something more declarative.

Edit: forgot the bit where everyone "parses" the output of commands like `ifconfig` and pretends they will never change, or will never fail, or will return the information in the same format. How many scripts relied on grepping ifconfig output for "inet" before "inet6" broke the startup?