Yep. I remember upstart, as well as some really neat soft-lockups, when a system gone "bricked", even without console, in result of bad-written network address :)

To be honest, from very beginning I viewed both (upstart and systemd) as dead-ends. Dependencies? Meh, rcorder in NetBSD has local dependencies years ago and, for larger installations, local-only dependency system has no value - because my app needs mysql... on another server. And modern init and supervision suite (systemd) without concept of inter-network dependecy? Meh. Like... let me think... a project of modern desktop without concept of remote work in eve of remote work explosion and covid times too - or something like that.

Supervising? I already had daemontools, monit, runit and whatever else (not mentioning s6) - even nowadays I really don't see cases, when systemd is used to restart services automatically.