If you change the word "arbitrary" to "necessary" (implying a different bias than the one you went with) then all of a sudden this attitude sounds less helpful.
Similarly "easy to limp along with a bad architecture" could be re-written as "easy to work with the existing architecture".
At the end of the day, it's about getting work done, not making decisions that are the most "pure".
Windows ME/Vista/8 were terrible and widely hated pieces of software because of "getting things done" instead of making good decisions. They made billions of dollars doing it, don't get me wrong, but they've also lost a lot of market share too and have been piling on bad sentiment for years. They've been pivoting and it has nothing to do with "getting work done" but by going back and making better decisions.
This attitude will lead to a total breakdown of the development process over the long term. You are privileging Work Done At The End Of The Day over everything else.
You need to consider work done at every relevant time scale.
How much can you get done today?
How much can you get done this month?
How much can you get done in 5 years?
Ignore any of these questions at your peril. I fundamentally agree with you about purity though. I'm not sure what in my piece made you think I think Purity Uber Alles is the right way to go.
As evidenced by Microsoft following the one repo rule and not being able to release any new software.
Wait, what ?
Linux by itself is just a kernel and won't do anything for you without the rest of the bits that make up an operating system.
Which is to say, not shockingly, it is typically a tradeoff debate where there is no toggle between good and bad. Just a curve that constantly jumps back and forth between good and bad based on many many variables.
When it comes to process managers, there is obviously disagreement about how complex they should be, but systemd is still a system to manage and collect info about processes.