At the level I care about, which is “I want this daemon to start when I boot up the computer”, systemd is much better. I can write a ~5 line unit file that will do exactly that, and I’ll be done.

With init, I needed to copy-paste a 50-line shell script that I don’t really understand except that a lot of it seemed to be concerned with pid files. Honestly, I fail to see how that’s better…