This website tries to become a collection of resources pointing out reasons against systemd and what alternatives are available.
systemd claims to be a good and modern replacement for SysVinit ‐ a so called init daemon. Usually the init daemon is the first process spawned by the kernel and thus has the PID #1 and is responsible for spawning other daemons which are necessary for the OS to operate, e.g. networking, cron, syslog etc.
List of init daemons * :