How is the systemd project any different in that respect than the GNU project, or FreeBSD? If you don't want systemd-boot, or systemd-networkd, or literally any

How is the systemd project any different in that respect than the GNU project, or FreeBSD? If you don't want systemd-boot, or systemd-networkd, or literally anything other than core systemd and the journal you don't even have to build it, let alone install and run it. The only part of systemd other than core init that you have to run is the journal and even then you can configure the journal to just forward to rsyslog and not store any logs even just in tmpfs. Stuff like systemd-nspawn wasn't even developed to be a container management solution. IIRC the main goal was just to leverage the existing namespacing features in core systemd to allow booting up a minimalistic container in order to make developing systemd easier.