Virtual machines, containers and appliances all require very short boot times, because they may be created and booted frequently.

Sometimes it feels as if these would be better served with the age old DOS flat files than something as convoluted as a *nix init.

This because if a "service"/daemon fails to come up, you may as well scuttle the whole VM/container/appliance and spin up another in its place.

But linux isn't all about servers, there's a lot of desktop users out there.

And having desktop and server diverge at a kernel/init level seems too much burden to maintain.

no, there are almost no desktop users out there; certainly, far fewer, probably by two orders of magnitude, than server and embedded installations; and the divergence in favor of doing things the desktop developers' way is very much the tail wagging the dog.