Two questions:
- do you admit that, comparing only its functionalities as an init system, systemd provides no benefits over alternatives?
- what non-init functionalities does systemd provide, which are necessary and beats competition from other software that provides those features?
Sure, the alternative init systems don’t provide non init functionalities, but other software probably does.
What does a programmer need?
This doesn’t seem to be something a distro can solve beyond making it possible to install this stuff.
Maybe the closest is nixos, because it allows a lot of flexibility in setting up different development environments that are fully reproducible. Gentoo is also close, as it allows the same but in a different way (without the extent of reproducible guarantees).