I'm not saying it was necessarily easier to use, just easier to understand what was going on. Explaining step by step how a Unix systems started up used to be trivial and make sense. I don't hate systemd, I just don't understand it. But that could also be symptom of me being old.

This mess is easy to solve with a library of functions to call, e.g. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions, which can be imported and used. Unfortunately, there is no standard API for this.