After more than two decades in development, the service management daemon GNU Shepherd has finally reached the 1.0-labeled milestone. Its highlights include transient and timed services, log rotation, integrated logging, as well as improved service insights. Additionally, the deprecated GOOPS interface is now gone.https://www.notebookcheck.net/GNU-Shepherd-1-0-released-after-two-decades-in-development.930203.0.html
Is this a systemd replacement?
Short answer is "Yes" and the long one...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728396