There is no "turtles" issue here. Pid 1 is special - if it dies, the system panics. It is good design to keep pid 1 as simple as possible and put the complex job logic in a sub-process. There are only two things on unix which init must do: reap any children it inherits, and start something else to do the heavy lifting.

Even sysV init works this way. The current sysV init is very simple -- the invocation complexity lives in /etc/rc and the related rc.d scripts which operate as subprocesses.

"Smart people" is a silly thing to say. We're all smart people and sometimes smart people make poor technical decisions. Let the matter lay upon its technical merit, not upon empty platitudes.