I agree (and I'd say the low point was when I upgraded a laptop to buster and silently ended up with systemd-resolved ignoring my local LAN DNS to try to forwar

I agree (and I'd say the low point was when I upgraded a laptop to buster and silently ended up with systemd-resolved ignoring my local LAN DNS to try to forward everything to 8.8.8.8 so couldn't resolve local hostnames). However, you're not stuck with systemd on Debian. Install sysvinit-core and remove systemd-sysv, and install libpam-elogind and elogind instead of libpam-systemd if you need it. You'll very likely still end up with some of the libraries installed - it's not the end of the world and you can install Devuan if you really don't want that, but systemd won't be running as PID 1 and you don't get rubbish like journald or resolved.