I am, in a way, reminded reminded of PulseAudio. I kept PA of my desktop and laptop for years, having heard about PA being a complex nightmare to configure and make work that caused audio to break. Eventually, there was an application I needed to use that had a hard dependency on PA, so I bit the bullet and installed it. And everything magically Just Worked. My only complaint at the moment is that the pactl command seems more fiddly and verbose than it might need to be.
A closer look at the complaints about PA showed that many of them were older. This gives me the impression that PA was in fact a steaming pile that broke audio at one point, but eventually matured into something functional and useful.
And I think this is where systemd is at present: perhaps a good idea, but its implementation is not yet production ready, and should not be the default on production systems. And the project's continued scope creep is working against it in that regard.