As a user, systemd wins for me hands down, because it is simple to use. That it masks complexity away from me is a feature, not a bug. This is also why distros is implementing it almost everywhere: It makes their job easier.
Now if you are measuring the complexity of the system's (full) implementation, you can't really compare systemd to to SysV-init. You need to compare a systemd-based system to a SysV-init based system.
And then you need to account for the 100s of inconsistently written shell-scripts, all the code distributed in the mess of third party dependencies (sh, bash, Perl, Awk, Python, su, supervisord, cron, etc) to ensure that the functionality of the systems you are comparing is really somewhat equal, not to mention the added complexity of the glue between all those components, and how it may fail.
And when you do that comparison, I do believe you will end up concluding that 1. full systems are somewhat complex, for both systems, and 2. that systemd-based systems are not fundamentally more complex, and 3. systemd-based systems have the benefit of a single, centralized implementation for all these core functions, so that developers don't have to reimplement them inconsistently, and possibly buggy.
With systemd, for better or worse, either your entire init-chain is broken or it isn't, so when it works, you know it works. With SysV-init you have no such guarantees.
Now if you are measuring the complexity of the system's (full) implementation, you can't really compare systemd to to SysV-init. You need to compare a systemd-based system to a SysV-init based system.
And then you need to account for the 100s of inconsistently written shell-scripts, all the code distributed in the mess of third party dependencies (sh, bash, Perl, Awk, Python, su, supervisord, cron, etc) to ensure that the functionality of the systems you are comparing is really somewhat equal, not to mention the added complexity of the glue between all those components, and how it may fail.
And when you do that comparison, I do believe you will end up concluding that 1. full systems are somewhat complex, for both systems, and 2. that systemd-based systems are not fundamentally more complex, and 3. systemd-based systems have the benefit of a single, centralized implementation for all these core functions, so that developers don't have to reimplement them inconsistently, and possibly buggy.
With systemd, for better or worse, either your entire init-chain is broken or it isn't, so when it works, you know it works. With SysV-init you have no such guarantees.