> udev is a core component in any modern linux system I see systemd absorbing it as nothing but a political move and a power grab.

I think this is a bit of a stretch. It's not like they did a hostile take over of udev. The maintainers also thought systemd was the right place for that code to live.

As for bloat, there certainly have been some new features, but so much of the systemd code (from what I can tell) was existing code that now lives in one place. That means it's free to consolidate the utility code it uses (every project has helpers for what (g)libc does not provide). In the grand scheme of things, less duplicated code is a good thing.