The discussion is not about wether systemd works or not, because it does. Obviously it's not perfect (as any software), but overall, it's fine. The problem comes from the implementation. Linux is *NOT* a company, and will never be.

A company doesn't need a handful of minisoftware. it wants one big software to do *everything*. And that's what systemd does. The problem is that systemd "forbids" the use of any other software by creating dependencies within the softwares that use it. That's why you'd have to recompile almost all your softs if your remove systemd from a system, to get rid of systemd dependencies. It's the first time in the linux history where programs have a special behavior because of the init system. Seriously, why would you want `mpv` (the video player) to be linked to your init system ?!

Now there are two point of view:

• Systemd is nice, it makes every software work with it !
  
• Systemd is shit, it makes every software depend on it !
  

I find systemd convenient in a professional environment, where you don't have to monitor thousands things. But personnaly, I like the ability to replace every piece of soft by an other on my systems..

Then you *still* have a choice of distro: gentoo, slackware, crux, alpine, nutyx, ... Sure, those are "raw" distro that you have to build by hand. But if you just want your distro to "run", then, systemd will do it.