Right now, nothing is practically "better" than systemd, but replacing init and figuring out all the different decoupled services that make a non-systemd system provide anywhere near the same featureset (and need to be installed separately) is a very interesting exercise on its own, that will teach you why the different bits are important and a bit of linux history.
You can replace the init system on just about any linux distro with a bunch of handwritten shell scripts, slackware style, or use any of OpenRC or s6 to provide you with a framework to make it easier, OR, you can use a preconfigured distribution, of which I'd recommend Artix, Alpine, Void or Slackware, and reading into their respective source code.
At the end of the day, an init is an init. You don't need a lot of the features systemd provides as a home user, though they don't actively hurt to have either.
You can replace the init system on just about any linux distro with a bunch of handwritten shell scripts, slackware style, or use any of OpenRC or s6 to provide you with a framework to make it easier, OR, you can use a preconfigured distribution, of which I'd recommend Artix, Alpine, Void or Slackware, and reading into their respective source code.
At the end of the day, an init is an init. You don't need a lot of the features systemd provides as a home user, though they don't actively hurt to have either.