It largely depends on the use case. dbus is functionally just a transport layer - it can very easily be used to implement an actor model if you choose to do-so

It largely depends on the use case. dbus is functionally just a transport layer - it can very easily be used to implement an actor model if you choose to do-so (services can dynamically register and unregister channels). There are quite a few cases where reliable 1-to-many and many-to-many communications need to occur. This is particularly the case when you have many loosely affiliated independent applications with optional communication paths. d-bus, for all of its flaws... does that well enough that I rarely notice it's running on my system.