From my own experience the alternatives are fine as long as the distro maintainers put on the effort to make them work.

I've used Devuan and others with runit, sysV, s6 and openrc. And honestly, openrc is the better alternative from an user perspective.

Nevertheless, it is hard to argue against systemd when the critical mass is there, and you run into eventual problems.

Still, I find alternatives such as runit and openrc easier to reason about than systemd. Perhaps this is due to the need to fully grok them, so you're able to fix issues yourself. Contrast that with systemd, where there are plenty of drag and drop solutions out there, so that requirement is lessened. You could also argue the real reason is systemd's complexity, but personally that doesn't feel like the core reason.

Either way, it's good that there are alternatives. I like how heterogenous the whole Linux ecosystem can be, it helps mitigate large scale security issues.