Comment by pona-a

Yes the other tools at the time were pretty bad, but after and around the time systemd came out, they did get much better than the sysv-init days.

Check out dinit, it's basically the same declarative philosophy as systemd, but without the bloat, and with a much simpler config API. Or s6 if you specifically care about "modular", though unless you're an embedded dev, you probably don't actually want that.