I am not someone who knows arcane system programming, but I use Linux since 20 years on commercial laptops, from Asus, DELL and Lenovo, etc. IMO the Linux of the 2000' where much better than today's Linux. The Linux I use are always Debian based, like Ubuntu.

For example Linux used to have a sleep mode which worked perfectly. Now it does not sleep reliably. For example if I move the mouse while it sleeps, it wakes up, even with the screen closed and uses the battery until there is no more energy in them. So the computer is unusable when I need it.

Another example is copy/paste. Today it works sometimes, some other times it paste another previous content. I use now Ubuntu 20.0.4 LTS. I just copied/pasted the version number from the system monitor panel to write this post, it pasted a previous content I copied in my browser!

A third example when I use a right click on Ubuntu's Chromium (a snap browser) then I have garbage on the screen. This browser can't display correctly non western characters.

So I do not know if its because systemd but a few years ago I used Trisquel Linux which did not used systemd at the time, and everything worked perfectly as I remember in the 2000'.