> Sure but there are tons of simple cron alternatives with better syntax
But you loose the main point, that is consistency of syntax. Nowadays thanks to systemd I can use the exact same syntax to configure my daemons, my network, my DNS resolver, my timers, my locale, etc etc. The mental burden is way lighter than with the traditional UNIX toolset.
You could have made the same consistency and mental burden argument about the crontab syntax. There are a lot of things in Unix which are table-driven and the tables take the form of one line per record with fields delimited by whitespace, blank lines ignored, and line comments introduced by hash.
Indeed these are your job scheduler (crontab), your mount points (fstab), your local host name resolution (hosts), your NS switch (nsswitch.conf), your terminal login services (ttys), your device permissions (fbtab), your automounts (auto_master), your plug-and-play device permissions (devfs.conf), your network services (inetd.conf), your MAC policy (mac.conf), your local network name resolution (networks), your call-out telephone numbers (phones), your network protocol name map (protocols), your RPC service map (rpc), and your network port name map (services).
And those are just the ones in /etc .
This set of table files with a common syntax is just as consistent and as light a burden as the set of .INI files that you are talking about. And any argument that you can make about things like having to remember what the fields mean can also be made just as much about the .INI files.
But you loose the main point, that is consistency of syntax. Nowadays thanks to systemd I can use the exact same syntax to configure my daemons, my network, my DNS resolver, my timers, my locale, etc etc. The mental burden is way lighter than with the traditional UNIX toolset.