[lmm]

It's "just an INI file" but you would have to understand what the thing that's interpreting does. All the stuff that the OP described as a positive - dependencies, auto-restarts, socket activation - somewhere there's a codebase that's implementing all that, and you can't just understand your "config file", you have to understand what that codebase is actually doing with all of its concepts. Elsewhere in this thread someone writes about how great it is that systemd is using a cgroup namespace to keep track of each process instead of a PID, and maybe that is great, but it's yet another new concept that you have to understand to understand how any of this works. Etc.

You could say that a shell script is a config file for bash, and you have to understand bash to understand what it's doing. But a shell is both simpler than systemd, and something that anyone working with Linux already understands.