So no, I shouldn't need to have to "learn to trust the operating system / systemd" on my servers -- it has no reason to be there!
... the one that people who moved away from System 5 rc scripts years ago have been pushing for with some degree of success, for years. systemd is not its source at all. systemd has merely been reaping the benefit of all of the programs over the past 18 years that have gained a --no-fork or a --foreground or a -D or a -F or whatever option in response to those who wanted to run services properly without bodging things under daemontools, or runit, or s6, or perp, or freedt, or daemontools-encore ...
CoreOS has been quite successful in basing their own infrastructure on systemd and with rkt they are moving to use systemd even more.