Alpine is incredibly minimal given its extensive use for containers so I doubt it’d have many services out of the box.

When I say init I mean the original init - sysvinit (I’m old so that’s been called init since the dawn of time).

OpenRC is fine. It still depends on init, parallelism is optional and not standard, and still uses shell scripts (genuinely a bad idea in modern days / I’ve worked incident response and seen how admins never spot a sneaky reverse shell dropped into a init script they don’t understand).

I happily use OpenRC on a daily basis across loads of Docker containers - it’s a great tool in the right hands and super for minimal environments with a single purpose - but for desktops, workstations, hypervisors, or multi-service servers, SystemD really does solve the huge issue of scripts instead of config, dependency hell, and ultimately the problem of handling a lot of low level stuff which most users aren’t suited to handle, troubleshoot, or investigate, especially when things go wrong or threat actors have compromised the system.

Another benefit is, with upstream handling unit config, it’s so much easier to hop distro now and have some consistency with services and networking than what it was like when there was a different philosophy from every distro on things like leasing from DHCP… Saves a lot of time during DFIR.

Sounds more likely to be your distro than the init system. You’ve probably got a load of junk units, optional units running for no reason, etc.

Unless you’re getting your hands dirty configuring each initialisation system by hand, it’s not a fair comparison.