I think in general it's a shrinking minority. I was outspokenly critical of systemd in the past, but much about it has improved, and I have to admit it has made my life significantly easier in many ways. I'm still not a big fan of some things being systemd projects that don't really need to be under the umbrella (why is resolved even a systemd project? Or systemd-timesyncd?) but service definition and management, transient services, sockets, timers, and many many more things are pretty great. At this point, I pretty much love it. Even things that initially annoyed me, like timers, I've grown to love, not least because my cronjob entries are manageable files that I can commit and backup, and I can individually enable and disable them without having to deal with stupid commenting and such.

Checking service status and managing services is also significantly better with systemd than any other init system I've used, and I've used a lot over 15 years of systems administration.

I still find journald a bit annoying, though, and I still am not completely sold on binary log files. I understand the benefits, but working with them is still much more opaque than text logs.

I'd be excellent to see their complaints collected and elaborated. Because God Fucking Damn, these seem like some incredible whining Advanced Persistent Threats against anything getting better. If I were a pro-discord disruptor, I'd pay these people to keep at their endless grudges against every single person having to figure out ever single fucking capability de-novo.

Systemd makes so so so many incredibly good service administration capabilities easy & on tap. The main thing I want from systemd haters is to show how how how folks did things well before. Mostly I think this is a rebellion of the losers, people who hate having to do a good job, people who hate learning the many many many many ways we could run services better, who valorize each service figuring out their own unique special bespoke ways of running their stuff. Its fallen as fuck. We need need need the systemd socialization of running stuff well, controlling permissions & access. There's near zero precedent from the past of anyone else being responsible. That's just the situation. Systemd has drastically elevated what sysops can do, orthogonally to the service by service init launching of the past that got us no where.

One might even go so far as to say they're a vocal minority.