Consider yourself lucky if you haven’t been there in the times before systemd. It streamlined a lot of things under the hood that were stupidly varied among distros, like where certain configurations were placed. Really, nobody needed that and it broke a lot. Systems also introduced some sanity through service dependency awareness, e.g., which service needs to be running before the next can be started. You might find that obvious, but Linux was still stuck in the 80s on that level and essentially a guessing game.
That said, if you want to try something else, the most reasonable but quite involved alternative is probably guix with shepherd.
Consider yourself lucky if you haven’t been there in the times before systemd. It streamlined a lot of things under the hood that were stupidly varied among distros, like where certain configurations were placed. Really, nobody needed that and it broke a lot. Systems also introduced some sanity through service dependency awareness, e.g., which service needs to be running before the next can be started. You might find that obvious, but Linux was still stuck in the 80s on that level and essentially a guessing game.
That said, if you want to try something else, the most reasonable but quite involved alternative is probably guix with shepherd.