I've been using systemd for a while, which I'm surmising is what you're referring to when you say controversial, and it's frankly not a diminished experience for someone that wants a consistently working desktop. The amount of things I used to have to hack into my OS were substantial, these days they're nearly nil and applications have common interfaces to plug into.

I'm not sure what, if anything, I materially gave up other than that all of those components have a contracted API now so all future components will need to adhere to that API.