It is terrible technically. It does too many things (for no apparent reason) and it's every other month that we see some enormous exploit for it.
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-7971...
There are 11 total from 2015: one arbitrary access, one which allows administrators to run a process as root rather than the intended user (CVE-2017-1000082), and some DoS opportunities. Not great and several great examples of why C should not be used but hardly “every other month”.
Now, it's hard to compare that it against other systems because it combines functionality which people used to have to use third-party tools for or roll themselves so you have to count that against every buggy init script or supervisor feature, apps whose developers never got around to adding the hardening features which systemd does use, etc.
Weirdly though, getting a CVE assigned can be a real PITA (and unsuccessful). The people who do the CVE assignment are generally overloaded, so lower impact/priority stuff often seems to get missed or not bothered with.
The alternative is DWF, which would be more popular if this was a more common problem.
Thanks, that's really good news.
* Unfortunately, they aren't alone in their sloppy handling of security issues. Rust is also another project that is known to not file CVEs for serious bugs if they occur in previous releases.