These improvements weren't real. There was a long tail of scripts that didn't follow the standard and never would. Every distribution still had their own customizations on how sysvinit scripts worked (e.g. debian with start-stop-daemon, suse with insserv, etc.)

And rc was different on almost every major distro family, which made life even more difficult for no particularly good reason.

And there's a certain point where all these things you are doing are ultimately to paper over the "hacks and untidiness" of everything. The introduction of systemd had two major effects:

1. It broke all non-LSB init scripts (because LSB is all it supported)

2. It introduced a straightforward declarative syntax for system resources (units for services, timers, mounts, etc.)

I would argue that the above two things have done more to standardize the Linux plumbing layer and help people take fuller advantage of it than literally all the linting, guidelines, and policywork we did for the decade prior.