Well, systemd IS useful, the same way Kafka is. I don't want to back to crappy bash for service management, and Kafka is a de fact standard event streaming solution.

But both are kind of hard to understand end-to-end, especially for an occasional user.

I have no dog in the systemd wars. The bash output is what? Distro use other open source software.

not really. both requires that you know obscure and badly documented stuff.

systemd whole premise is "people will not read the distro or bash scripting manual"...

then nobody read systemd's (you have even less reason, since it's badly written, ever changing in conflicting ways, and a single use tool)

so you went from complaining your coworkers can't write bash to complaining they don't know they have to use EXEC= EXEC=/bin/x

because random values, without any hint, are lists of commands instead of string values.