From the announcement, it saddens them too:

> As a personal note, I do not like this decision. To me LFS is about learning how a system works. Understanding the boot process is a big part of that. systemd is about 1678 "C" files plus many data files. System V is "22" C files plus about 50 short bash scripts and data files.

However the reasoning they provide makes sense.. It's hard to build a Linux system with a desktop these days without Sysd.