I'm personally running Artix with runit and things are fine so far, but as ChrisG pointed out, dinit is basically a drop-in replacement for systemd syntax-wise.

Although if you're on Artix, you'll need to enable Arch's [extra] and [multilib] repos or you'll run into dependency issues on some apps due to some packages not being available in the main Artix repos. I learned this when trying to install steam-native-runtime, there were some Python deps which weren't available in the main Artix repos, but that were available in the Arch repos, if I'm remembering right.

Also, I recommend enabling the unofficial [liquorix] repo in order to get a newer kernel with more frequent updates than what Artix provides in their repos, eg. the default and zen kernels in the Artix repos lag a bit behind the lqx kernel from the [liquorix] repo, and I still recommend enabling [chaotic-aur] as a convenience repo on any Arch distro.

I also switched to MATE from KDE out of concern that KDE could end up following GNOME's path after SDDM is deprecated, plus I just wanted a lighter and different desktop, that and MATE's default two-panel layout is completely usable from stock although you might wanna set the panels to auto-hide to maximize screen space.

systemd....works fine for me. Have changed from systemd-boot to Limine because I dual boot and it's better at handling Windows and Window's EFI partition being installed on a separate drive. It just auto-detects it and means that if I do decide to completely ditch Windows I can just wipe that drive.

What you can expect when switching from a system management tool written for Linux to an init tool targetting the least common denominator of general Unix functionality?

Less functionality, less security, less information about the state the system is in, less reliable switching between states and a whole lot less of linux kernel features exposed to your use in convenient ways.

It's not as if systemd was started to be complicated, the world got complicated. E.g. we used to just create all the device nodes in /dev statically during system installation. Then USB became a thing and supported so many different kinds of devices with thousands of potential ports to connect them to. They would not fit into the device node namespace! So we needed to make device nodes dynamic, which is also convenient.You do not have lots of device nodes that do not exist on your system and you no longer need to change system configuration when you plug your mouse into another port of your system.

Filesystems, security (often linux specific) features, everything is easy more complex (and more dynamic) today than it was when sysv init was a thing. That simple stuff was great when you had to power off your machine to change its available devices. It is less cool when you plug an USB-C cable into your laptop and want to use all the stuff that is now suddenly available.