I concur. My main pain point is the size and aggressiveness of the whole "subsystem". I compare it to Sys-V init, because it's the best example I have used until systemd.
This is not a good comparison because even Windows 2000's service model is better than SysV.
I have been finding myself more and more reaching for alpine linux and have liked openrc.
I am a nixos user so have to use systemd on nixos and that makes it very painful, but I can see myself moving away nixos as my host machines os for many reasons but systemd and the painful way nixos uses it is a big one.