Can we please stop misrepresenting the complaints against systemd? The only time I ever hear this "monolithic binary" argument is from systemd advocates. The actual complaint is about tightly coupling important features together. Not only does this make it difficult (often impossible) to replace individual components, when tight coupling happens at the (internal) protocol level, any replacement component ne4cessarily hast to implement a bunch of (sometimes unwanted) systemd baggage.
Busybox implements all of its features in single monolithic binary, but it isn't a monolithic design that tightly couples those specific components together. Replacing one of busybox's components is often as simple as removing busybox's symlink and installing the replacement. This isn't even a "Unix philosophy" issue. Even inexperienced designers shouldn't have as hard time Understanding why systemd is a monolithic design but busybox isn't.