Throughout Jessie and Stretch, I have been running Debian without systemd as the init system. If systemd became installed by accident, I promptly removed it in favor of sysvinit.
I have done so on six desktops, two laptops, and a large number (I will not specify, but in the hundreds) of servers. I have encountered no problems that can be attributed to my choice of init system. I hope that this situation continues in the next iteration of Stable, but if not - I have investigated OpenRC and nosh, and determined to my own satisfaction that openrc does not offer enough benefits to be worth the cost of changing over, but nosh might. -dsr-
