As a sysadmin in a mixed shop in the early 1990s I found that I could do just fine with traditional CLI and scripting tasks without using HP-UX's SAM or Sun's Solstice tools, but AIX's SMIT and smitty really got in the way of that sort of cheap and dirty automation. I understood the purpose of all those tools, but AIX pretty well made SMIT and smitty obligatory and that did not sit well with me back then. In the context of what you've said comparing SMIT and systemd, I would agree based on my experiences of way back then.