Is modularity an unalloyed good? Modularity comes with tradeoffs that mean you end up with, well, a bunch of discrete modules rather than something that works cohesively. That's why systemd was adopted pretty much everywhere, ignoring the arbitrary modular boundaries results in a more useful tool.

Some analogs: modern filesystems like ZFS and BTRFS that combine volume management with the filesystem, every service that's consciously chosen to deploy a monolith instead of microservices, and so on, every deployment that chooses to statically link, etc.

Poettering does work for microsoft.

“but its just an init system, you don’t have to use these pieces!“

/s

Here’s a vote for Devuan - you don’t have to accept systemD if you don’t want to. I didn’t.