Systemd as a project has developed a history of moving goalposts. Their initial talk was about boot speed by using dependency trees and parallel execution. But

Systemd as a project has developed a history of moving goalposts. Their initial talk was about boot speed by using dependency trees and parallel execution. But when containerization caught the zeitgeist, they were quick to trot out nspawn as an alternative to, say, Docker (never mind that Docker and RH devs had a bit of a spat around the same time). Since then they have been shifting the goalposts towards whole system management, perhaps best likened to Windows Active Directory, by adding more and more sub-systems that frankly has crap all to do with booting. On top of all this it seems the people involved regularly end up pulling grsec style "fixing" of systems that work in real life but are "broken" according to some spec or other (sometimes ignoring decades of hard earned experience in the process, as was the case with their DNS reimplementation).