I can already boot a fully functioning system without half the stuff in systemd (and in fact, there's entire distros and the entire world of embedded devices wh

I can already boot a fully functioning system without half the stuff in systemd (and in fact, there's entire distros and the entire world of embedded devices which do so). GNOME and KDE did work just fine without systemd until they didn't. udev did as well. Samba, PAM, OpenSSH, and most of the rest of the services on my system, work just fine without it. I rather doubt that'll be the case five years down the line.