This. I can see the utility of systemd and probably would have liked to have it when my team was riding herd on a DC full of Sun E15Ks and HP Superdomes. But for basically everything else that I use Linux for, every time someone says "systemd does this", at least 50% of the time I don't need that, and most of the rest I could do with with other tools with vastly less complexity.

Not "this". By that logic most people do not need backups too. Rebuilding working service state after config change is non-trivial, requires using admin-only kernel interfaces, and said kernel does not care about these types of problems. Meaning average user ends up simply rebooting rather than trying to figure why enabling wifi makes printer stop working (and such). We cannot have network stuff controlled by multiple programs, because linux kernel is broken like that. This thing is the userspace part of the monolith.