Unfortunately, there aren't any concrete examples (unless I skipped something accidentally), so it's hard to tell what exactly is meant as "does more" or that i

Unfortunately, there aren't any concrete examples (unless I skipped something accidentally), so it's hard to tell what exactly is meant as "does more" or that it doesn't "stand out of the way" etc. Yes, systemd services can do a lot of things. Except that before rc scripts did all those things, but without any unified and standardized primitives. systemd provides those for a lot of common use cases - and that's how it ended up doing so much - because our rc scripts used to do that. systemd actually does less because unit files are not scripts (but one can hook any external program in a lot of places, if they need to). Also, as I understand it, systemd isn't a single piece of software either, it's a whole project with a bunch of semi-autonomous pieces, tied with common conventions and assumptions. It's difficult to define the scope for an umbrella project, and I believe individual pieces all have their scopes relatively well-defined.