How do you all feel about systemd. I know this has been a topic talked about for years and years, but people still talk about it today.
It works fine for the job it’s designed to do. It does it in a significantly more monolithic manner than historic UNIX architectures and approaches (System V, BSD init, etc) did similar jobs.
It doesn’t suck from a “does it work perspective” in my eyes. Whether it’s a good long term approach given the monolithic nature binding more tools and services to a single framework should be a continued debate among the community.
If you don’t want to use it, then pick a distro that doesn’t use it. If you can’t find a distro that doesn’t use it, start one. If your distro gets popular than Systemd will be sidelined over time.
Historical References: X11/Xfree86/Wayland, telnet, MySQL/MariaDB, Linux/BSD kernels, etc.