Sure. Spend a focused 10 minutes to really try and understand them and you'll realize that a cron line is a perfectly concise and flexible syntax for creating scheduled time events. It even handles that crazy case where you want to run on a specific day of the week. Cron lines may seem arcane at first, but then again have you ever tried to write code that was timezone aware? Welcome to a special kind of hell. What I'm trying to say is there's complexity there and you'll be a better programmer if you embrace it.

Unix programmers aren't in the habit of throwing out a working system because it's hard to grok, nor building something more complex then it needs to be. I took a look at your systemd timers link and it is a more complex syntax to create the same effect. From their own caveats section:

> Complexity: to set up a timed job with systemd you create two files and run a couple systemctl commands. Compare that to adding a single line to a crontab.