I’ve been doing Linux a long time and my experience is that systemd is much more pleasant to work with than the brittle duct tape and shell script stuff which came before.
Was just making the parallel with Wayland, how frustrating it has been for a lot of people, how everyone preaching correct software design, should be simple/protocols/standards/modular with correct responsibilities between projects... and how fast everyone forgot it
Here for example, suddenly systemd will be mandatory despite systemd not caring for multiple session of a single user. Not only not yet implemented but totally that don't need it personally so no one can want to have it. And so again the capability of our linux based distribution will be restricted for something that was just working for decades.
Again, we can also notice how systemd people try to force systemd usage down or throats by making it mandatory for core parts like the login. Where it is not the responsibility of the initsystem to deal with that (except in windows) and if the thing was not a damned crap, it would be easy to switch to alternatives with clear interfaces.
systemd is not an init system. It's an umbrella project with many distinct tools and services, only one of which is an init provider.
Nobody is forcing systemd down anyone's throats. You can use init.d if you like, or OpenRC, or whatever you prefer. What's happening instead is that people who maintain software are no longer interested in maintaing init.d scripts or working around the missing features many supposed alternatives lack.
Just a few weeks ago, in some systems that worked perfectly without systemd, I have upgraded Xorg server, but the new version would no longer run, because it has acquired a hard dependence upon systemd.
As a workaround, I had to run the additional elogind daemon, which does not provide any useful function, except of keeping happy the developer who has added this extra systemd dependency.
Such events have happened for years, every few months, with more and more dependencies of systemd added to various applications, which after that do not gain any useful feature but they force their users who do not want systemd to waste time for developing workarounds that satisfy the new undesirable systemd dependencies.