[Hendrikto]

> But surely everyone in this conversation is experienced enough to know that just because "lots of people" choose something, that doesn't always mean it's a good choice. :)

Sure, but systemd has quickly been adopted by the experts, namely the maintainers of every mainstream distribution. The people who maintain all of that infrastructure think it is much better than what we had before. That does say something about its quality.

> It's a monolith (right?)

That‘s a common misconception. You don‘t have to use all of systemd. And I am not talking about all of systemd, just the init system.

That also invalidates your point regarding networking, btw. You could keep using your setup with systemd.