They still explain what an init system is for and how to use it.
I'm OK with that in the end because my system is a better LFS anyhow. The only part that bothers me is that the change was made with reservations, rather than him saying no and putting his foot down, insisting that sysvinit stay in regardless of Gnome/KDE. But I do understand the desire to get away from having to maintain two separate versions of the book.
Ultimately I just have to part ways with LFS for good, sadly. I'm thankful for these people teaching me how to build a Linux system. It would have been 100x harder trying to do it without them.
The LFS project is free to make any decisions that they want about what packages they're going to include in their docs. If anyone is truly that upset about this then they should volunteer their time to the project instead of commenting here about what they think the project should do IMO.