Well futex based high performance mutex support which is 400x faster than what existed back when 4MB systems were sold. A Constraint solver that doesn’t deadlock, support for a boatload of functionality that didn’t even exist back then.

And most of the size comes from -O3 compiler optimizations that didn’t exist back then and if you build with -Os it is about 512KB of a memory footprint which is smaller than SysV out of the box on Debian. So it is snappy on a 386SX with 4MB of RAM if you go the gentoo route.

People use SystemD because it works better than what came before it and it will be replaced when something actually better shows up. No one happens to have found a generally better solution yet.

OpenRC, Gnu Shepherd, runit and S6 are available for people who like them better but don’t assume that they are generally better for someone else’s use cases until you know what they are.

22MB is too heavy???

Well S6 is lighter but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Gnu Shepherd is about the same but solid.

So elementary school teacher?