> but I had plenty of problems with shell-script-based init, and I don't wish to relive them
I should note that most of these problems were created by Linux distributions unable to standartize the startup scripts so each distribution and each program has quirks and problems with this scripts written in various ways — which leds to a well-known rumors about "shell scripts are inevitably bad to define startup/shutdown sequences"
In BSD world (as a user if FreeBSD and NetBSD I could speak only about these OSes) we have techologia named "rc.d framework" which standartizes the way to write startup scripts, so if developer followed the documentation — there are should no problems: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/rc-scripting/ and https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-rc.html
#FreeBSD #NetBSD