As it happens way too commonly, the loudest in OSS communities are ones that have zero stake in building or maintaining the projects they criticize. It's easy to just rant if everyone else has to pick up the extrenalities.
The reality of my situation is my job frequently involves meeting people where they are - and most people are on systemd. Issues with systemd have caused and continue to cause me significant headaches - sometimes they are one-off but major events, sometimes they are recurring frustrations because of specific design decisions. I've included a list with some examples of both elsewhere in these comments.
I don't want to build a competitor to systemd because I fundamentally disagree with the design philosophy that has led to the proliferation of a huge number of systemd-* replacements for other things that already worked fine for all of my use cases. For situations where I have complete control over the infrastructure and don't need to worry about junior engineers that only have experience in the systemd ecosystem, I don't run it, and my life is lower stress because of it. I don't even particularly care much about the init portion of it, though a lot of the improvements are things that I don't really care about, like boot time - if I'm in a situation where a server's boot time has some impact on our overall uptime, etc., then things have gone wrong in a very big way - but if it was just a new init system, I'd have minimal complaints.
But in general, it's one of the reasons that I have been glad to shift my professional focus away from being very specific to the Linux and compute side of things to broader cloud platforms, etc.
I don't want to build a competitor to systemd because I fundamentally disagree with the design philosophy that has led to the proliferation of a huge number of systemd-* replacements for other things that already worked fine for all of my use cases. For situations where I have complete control over the infrastructure and don't need to worry about junior engineers that only have experience in the systemd ecosystem, I don't run it, and my life is lower stress because of it. I don't even particularly care much about the init portion of it, though a lot of the improvements are things that I don't really care about, like boot time - if I'm in a situation where a server's boot time has some impact on our overall uptime, etc., then things have gone wrong in a very big way - but if it was just a new init system, I'd have minimal complaints.
But in general, it's one of the reasons that I have been glad to shift my professional focus away from being very specific to the Linux and compute side of things to broader cloud platforms, etc.