Ah, sorry, that was badly written. What I meant was that it looks like the shell script exits almost immediately, i.e. pid 1 forks the app process but then exits itself...
got it. The confusion then is spawning(no pun) from the assumption that pid 1 script forks while it doesn't. It calls a program and wait for it to exit. Only then pid 1 exits and the system shuts down.