I have never really understood the systemd hate. It sure as hell beat the sorcery that was managing init.d scripts for everything.

I managed the distro upgrade on hundreds of remotely-managed nodes, porting our kiosk appliance from a pre-systemd debian to a post-systemd debian, and out of all the headaches we suffered systemd was not one of them, short of a few quirks we caught in our development process. It pretty much just worked and the services it provided made that upgrade so much easier.

Curious how you got burned, I hear a lot of complaining but haven't seen a lot of evidence