Oh, to be clear I'm real mad about how systemd fails boot if (say) one of your filesystems is unavailable and makes you log in with a root password to fix it.

Oh, to be clear I'm real mad about how systemd fails boot if (say) one of your filesystems is unavailable and makes you log in with a root password to fix it. But OP was asserting that systemd crashes under normal operation because its pid 1 is too fragile, which is very different. At scale I already expect that there's a chance a machine won't come back if I reboot it - it's annoying if I can't ssh in, but, well, I already lost a disk I care about and it won't return to service and I need to fix it anyway. (And it's an easy fix, just add "nofail" to fstab.) At scale I don't expect init to crash under normal operation.