> I don't think an init system (whose job, ultimately, is to fork and exec a lot of things) is going to be harmed by it.
The performance overhead of the script-heavy init system that preceded it is in fact one of the core design points of systemd. Boot time still matters in some environments, and the old init scripts were completely out of hand.
Poeterring works for Red Hat and it was written on Fedora. Yes, Ubuntu had something else. I don't see how that's relevant to a discussion of systemd's design goals.
Fedora was one of those two systems, using upstart since Fedora 9. If you are going to participate in a systemd discussion, you should know what you are talking about, lest you once again (as indeed you are) promote the There Is Only System 5 init And systemd fallacy. Read the Uselessd Guy's articles already pointed to. Read the Debian Hoo-Hah where there were four choices. Read Lennart Poettering's own explanation, widely published a couple of years ago now, of how upstart was the motivator.
The performance overhead of the script-heavy init system that preceded it is in fact one of the core design points of systemd. Boot time still matters in some environments, and the old init scripts were completely out of hand.