Sir, this is a Wendy's.
If you want all-singing, all-dancing opaque binaries to handle every conceivable configuration eventuality, MacOS and Windows are <-- that way. Or, you could have patience, and sometime soon systemd will likely expand to cover your use-case.
On MacOS I remember many .plist files but no binary config files. The .plist format looks similar to XML.
I like the .ini format used by systemd (and do not have an opinion about the overall quality of systemd).