A bunch of barely working duck-taped Bash scripts? Hardly reasonable.

You’d be surprised just how often systemd calls bash scripts.

You might have done barely working duck-taped Bash scripts; not eveyone who calls themself a 'system admin' is competent. But actual professionals who ran these systems since the 1970s had carefully written, fully functional scripts and we were quite capable of keeping hundreds and thousands of servers running just fine. Being bad at your job isn't the tools fault.