How to safely shutdown bitcoind ? Surprised this one hasn't been asked yet.

But how / what is the recommended best practice for shutting down bitcoind ? 

Right now I'm manually killing the process with either sudo kill {pid} or if this is failing (like just now) using sudo pkill -9 -f bitcoind
I'm not sure if bitcoind stop still works as RPC with newer releases, since somewhere in help sections it says RPC funcionality removed from bitcoind.

Try bitcoin-cli stop.