I'm still using sysvinit without anything on top (the default would have been sysvinit + openrc, but I dropped openrc, too complicated for my needs). I find it a lot easier than learning systemd, or learning anything else. To find out what's going on, I just need to open one file: /etc/inittab, and it's all in there. Nothing hidden somewhere else. Nothing undocumented. Simple commands, one after another. There are no dependencies, no conditions, not unless I put them there myself.