I dislike overloading systemd with tools that are not related to running services but systemd does the "run services" (and auxiliary stuff like "make sure mount service uses is up before it is started" or "restart it if it dies" and hundred other things that are very service or use-case specific) very, very well and I used maybe 4 different alternatives across last 20 years
I'm not a systemD fan but SysV is not without its quirks and weirdness and foot guns
If you only learn about sysvinit and stop there, you are missing large parts of how a modern Linux distro boots and manages services.
That's the point on which people differ. Even if we take as given that rc/svinit/runit/etc is not good enough (and I don't think that's been established), there are lots of directions you can go from there, with systemd just one of them.
But frankly if goal is to learn people about how Linux works, having SysV there is opposite to that goal
Systemd and Xorg are very similar in many ways. I do not know how you hate Systemd and love Xorg unless your real problem is just change.
And, while I like Wayland, I think that liking the Wayland architecture should have you disliking Systemd. But that is just me.
The two projects are complete opposites except in one way, they replace older stuff.
In X11/Xorg's case, a common example would be environments built off different window managers, panels, launchers, etc. In theory nothing prevents Wayland to have something similar but in practice 17 years after its initial release, there isn't anything like that (or at least nothing that people do use).
At least in my mind, the Unix philosophy isn't some sort of dogma, just something to try and strive for and a base (like X11) that enables others to do that doesn't go against it from the perspective of the system as a whole.
It's been 17 years and Wayland has yet to reach feature parity with X11/Xorg. There is doubt that it ever will.
Regardless of what you think the Unix "philosophy" is, actual features matter.