Ah, good to know... just thinking out loud here ...
If one wanted to stick to a more classic init, I think the MX Linux guys pull from Debian Stable, but use the sysv init - BUT have the "shims" installed so that systemd is just ignored.
And, like Devuan, if one wants to use systemd, they can do so. For MX it might be a bootloader option to run systemd.
And to show I'm not paranoid, I wonder if TinyCore could benefit from using busybox / systemd as the init? Heresy? I'm kind of afraid to ask.