I think the reasonable argument is not old thing is better ( like some people make, but it has its own problems that are usually because of it trying to do everything.

My main issues stem from it's prevalence in server Distro's especially for micro service images.

D-bus is one of the great offenders for me and I don't like having it on even my desktop system but systemd wants it for many things and some things will just break without it. On a small micro service image, it would be nice to be able to strip lots of it down but systemd fights you on this because of the amount of moving parts and interconnected subs-sytems it introduces.

It doesn't have to replace the cron, resolver, time synchronization, system logs, bootloader, home folder management, all of the disk encryption, TPM, signing, users, and a whole lot to manage services.

I can understand the frustrations with Sys-V init scripts, but on the other hand, I never had a problem with that both as a sysadmin and a distribution developer.

To be honest, loginctl allowed us to pull some hacks, but to be fair, that hacks were to handle bad behavior from a very bad codebase. Any self-respecting development team wouldn't have written anything which needed OS/kernel level reaping to clean from system correctly.

We have been chatting recently, and someone who's more experienced than me said that they have never seen Nixie's cron to die spontaneously in the last 30 years. systemd's timers not only did that, the systemd didn't bother to restart it. Ironic, considering that the biggest feature of systemd is service supervision and unattended recovery.

There is no one thing a modern operating system should be. Requirements differ and for many systems you do in fact not need to cover more than in 1970's Unix.