Imho its not necessary for the average user, adding too much complexity.

For example, I tried to config gpsd to use another port, nothing would work; systemd quietly overrides gpsd's configfile and required additional systemd incantations to change what should have been easy. And the man pages are a mess

And journalctl makes me want to pull my hair out; just let me grep a regular file - discovering namespaces is a nightmare

It’s at odds with the philosophy of do one thing and do it well. Its monolithic feature set pushes out smaller contributors and leads to increased reliance on a singular package. This tends to self reinforce. I also use systemd in my current distro so not sure where I stand on this but it’s a fair concern.

Before systemd I had Redhat machines with 3 to 4 years of uptime, and now you need to restart Linux after updates....while Windows people rarely and they laugh at you...

New thing bad