(Pedants: I know AUTOEXEC.BAT not a direct ancestor of systemd, but it's a close cousin and serves the same purpose: run stuff when you boot.)
Uh, what? It's not fair to say that a vastly more complicated thing evolved from a simple thing? That's how it always happens - each step seems reasonable, and justified, but you look at what those countless rational decisions added up to, and bam. That's the complexity everyone says they hate. In technology, in government, in basically everything.
(Oddly, culture seems to be okay deprecating old bits of culture; the brain is inherently finite so we run in cycles and epicycles of cultural fashion that remains roughly at the same level of complexity.)
it is much simpler for some people to write a dependency-based init system and then for my OS to write dependencies for the OS services then for me to say "DependsOn = network.service" to permanently avoid racing dhcp or whatever.
Took some decades to collectively get tired enough to decide on a language to declare it
Machines and especially SSDs have gone a long way since ten years ago and people think Linux boots fast "thanks to systemd"... But I'd encourage these people to install Devuan just to give it a try. It may boot a tiny bit slower than Debian (for an identical system) but it's still very quick.
Put it in another way: the savings systemd did brought regarding booting times in 2015 aren't looking anywhere near as impressive today. I don't even know: on my 7700X I think from boot (since the moment I enter the disk decryption password) to (text mode) login prompt it take about a second under Debian (systemd)? Maybe it takes 1.5 seconds running Devuan (non-systemd)?
I mean: 20 seconds instead of 45 seconds may have seen like a bit saving in 2015 but 1 second vs 1.5 second, I don't give a rat's arse.
And people who really need super fast boot times in containers shall use Alpine without systemd anyway.