These days I see it as a bonus. I don't want to mess around with the boot process. I don't want to write some sort of glue layer in between loosely coupled parts. And I certainly don't want somebody else to do it either, because that too often tends to result in some kind of surprise that one has to deal with at 3 AM.

What I want is a solid system that does what it's supposed to -- start stuff -- in a maximally boring fashion.

This is far from true, lmao. It's only tightly coupled to depending on the Linux kernel.

systemd was in fact heavily inspired by MacOS's launchd. At worst, it can be said that complex boot managers will begin to converge on a design that actually works ~ MacOS did, Windows did, and now Linux has with systemd. The three have plenty of differences, though systemd is still closer to launchd than not.

And in actuality, it's very tweakable. Did you notice that the source code is open, for a start...?