They have fear of systemd becoming the mainstream init system. It's more easy for a project to become obsolete if we start to forget about it. Although sysvinit still has an chance to evolve.
At 1st year of CS they taught us to design and understand the simple machine, a simple computer with just a CPU and a control unit. They also taught us how MIPS architechture worked (quite simplified). I still remember the struggle to rotate a matrix in mips.