The article fails to mention another aspect of systemd that interferes with emmbedded dvelopment: it's utility applications (primarily systemctl, but all the others as well) are intended to be run on the booted system for which the control is being performed.

When configuring boot media, like an SD card, for an embedded ssystem that is not the running system where the configuration is occurring, this is an impediment. There is systemd-firstboot, etc, but this is not as convenient as just being able to set config options on the mounted (non-booted) embeddded media.

I've never liked it, I still don't like it, and I think the number of people in this camp is understated by the article.

However, I am still running it. As other posts have mentioned, switching distributions is a major hasstle, especially if you've built tools using the distro's architecture. For me, this is archlinux.

Although, I am in the process of testing and migrating to void linux. Which is systemd free, and hosts ARM and x86 binary package repositories.