"But systemd is not some monolith"
It. Does. Not. Matter.
Still to much code in one place. Not enough review and unrelated subproject bitrot at different rate without visibility.
It. Does. Not. Matter.
Still to much code in one place. Not enough review and unrelated subproject bitrot at different rate without visibility.
https://projects.apache.org/projects.html
or GNU
https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/GNU
Or FreeBSD or OpenBSD....
Having a single large overall project that manages a diverse number of individual software products is a common pattern and certainly something that isn't remotely unique to Systemd. There is no reason to denigrate systemd for that.
Part of the reason why people seem to (falsely) think systemd is monolithic is because distros have been historically bad at packaging it and haven't split up the components, but that's been improving over time.