I do not believe that it is possible for SysVInit itself to have any problems on laptops, because it does nothing that is hardware specific.
Since 2005, for more than 2 decades, I have used on all my laptops only Linux with Gentoo and SysVInit and I have never encountered any problem.
Perhaps you mean that your particular Linux distribution had some startup shell scripts (which are not a part of SysVinit, they are only launched by SysVInit when the run level is changed) that were buggy on laptops. Buggy initialization shell scripts are not unusual, but such scripts are normally small and any bugs are relatively easy to find and fix, unlike with the bugs of SystemD.
While you did not had any single problem with SystemD, when I first tried SystemD (with Arch Linux; that was many years ago and that specific bug must have been fixed some time later, but nonetheless it convinced me that the developers of SystemD are incompetent), SystemD exhibited the most stupid bug that I have ever seen in a computer, i.e. the shutdown of the computer was very slow in comparison with SysVInit and moreover it sometimes failed, which is a thing that I have never seen in a computer elsewhere.
The reason for failure was that SystemD, instead of just sending signals to all processes like SysVInit, it used some inter-process messaging through DBus. At that time, at least on my computer, there was some kind of race condition between the concurrent processes that were terminated and some times DBus died before some other process that tried to communicate through it and then the SystemD shutdown sequence remained stuck and it never completed.
I consider such a bug much worse than a bug caused by carelessness, like a buffer overflow, because it demonstrated an erroneous design of the architecture of the system.
Complete opposite of my experience. I've never had a single problem with SystemD - it's one of the most surprisingly reliable parts of Linux IMO.
In contrast SysVInit worked ok on servers and sort of on desktops, but on laptops forget it.