If there are, none have managed to make a strong case for themselves yet. Systemd has proven itself to be a huge boon for sysadmins, especially at scale. These kind of anti-systemd efforts usually come from stubborn old timers who probably aren't even employed in a capacity where they'd have to work with an init system at all (maybe they were fired for having obsolete skills?).
Yes I'm being a dick, but these people are also usually dicks, so fuck em.
Have you never heard of the concept of serialization? It's weird for you to bring up the Nintendo DS and not be familiar with that, as it's a very important topic in game development. Outside of game development, it's used a lot in network code. Even javascript has ArrayBuffer.
I've personally built small homebrew projects that run on both Nintendo DS and Windows/Linux. Is that really so hard to imagine? As long as you design proper abstractions, it's pretty straightforward.
Generally speaking, the best way to write optimal code is to understand your data first. You can't do that if you don't even know what format your data is in!