Indeed there isn't. And people that want simpler declarative configuration files can have them as far as I'm concerned.
My ire is the mentality common of Red Hat employees that I am wrong for wanting traditional Unix-style flexible configuration and their dependency politics to try to get others to switch over. If they just designed their software how they want to and otherwise let it be, such as KDE and XFCE are doing, then they would not be drawing the same criticism, but they have a tendency of coming with a dismissive attitude to everyone who wants it different than they do and insist their way is the future and when people point out that their way does not offer functionality they need either for convenience, or their livelihood they dismiss it.
> For now, if so many users have it easier thanks to systemd, which seems to indeed be the case, then it's still something.
If various Red Hat projects didn't find a way to create dependencies on systemd to encourage it's adoption and systemd was simply there for the people that wanted it but left those that didn't alone, then it wouldn't be so controversial.
What I quoted was “Who wouldn't want [...]”; that's the Red Hat mentality, that everyone who has subjective ideals than they either does not exist, or is wrong.