After 12 years (me converting in 2013 to systemd on Arch BTW)
I can say we finally have standardization between major distributions.
OpenRC, SysV or Upstart…? How to do things…

Real boot time improvement.
Real multiple instances of the same service (service-name@xyz.sevice).
Drop-in overrides. Builtin DNS cache, timesync, syslog, cron (kinda, timers have new syntax),
cgroups, boot manager, network manager, containers, and more…

Not a Unix or KISS philosophy, but come on, we need a fresh blood.
There is no “next gen” kernel/operating system in the horizon.

I have Devuan and PostmarketOS (Alpine with desktop environment),
I feel like a caveman. Things which are easy to do in systemd, in OpenRC are not trival.
OpenRC in Gentoo is not the same as in Devuan.

Also, more and more software is systemd-centric.

However.
I encourage you to discover Linux without systemd first (extra layer of abstraction may be difficult during learning).