It can't really - the problem with PulseAudio was that it was adopted by a major Linux distribution before it was ready for primetime. It worked well after a while.

Systemd is has been the main init system of several distributions (like Fedora) for some time now, so I wouldn't worry.

press "E" in grub, then add init="/bin/busybox" to the kernel command line. Then apt-get purge systemd (mounting may or may not be necessary).

That way you can still claim "the first thing I did was to remove it". But contrary to pulse, it will also be the last ;)