It's easy to have your existing biases validated if you already dislike systemd. The reality is that systemd is much more coherently designed than its predecess

It's easy to have your existing biases validated if you already dislike systemd. The reality is that systemd is much more coherently designed than its predecessors from a 'end user interface' point of view, hence why its units are largely portable etc. which was not the case for sysvinit. The reality is that it is not systemd specifically but our modern approach to software design where we tend to rely on too much third party code and delight in designing extremely flexible, yet ultimately extremely complex pieces of software. I mean this is even true as far as the various CPU attack vectors have shown in recent years, that yes speculative execution is a neat and 'clever' optimization and that we rely on it for speed, but that maybe that was just too clever a path to go down and we should've stuck with simpler designs that would maybe led to slower speedups but a more solid foundation to build future CPU generations on.