Interestingly, while Madaidan discourages the use of systemd in that guide, it’s still heavily relied on in Kicksecure; one of the distros he works on.
While you didn’t explicitly state it, it’s a distro that’s based on Debian, so, has to be based on systemd.
I think this is a perfect illustration of how systemd has become so good that even opponents can’t deny its merits and continue to make use of it for the time being out of necessity.
No, not at all. You said it yourself:
It’s troublesome if distros and/or DEs rely so heavily on systemd to do their bidding. So much so, that some combinations of distro + DE don’t allow any differentiation in init or make it very cumbersome and unwieldy at best.
So trying to use Kicksecure without systemd would be very cumbersome and unwieldy at best. Perhaps Madaidan should’ve used Devuan as a starting point instead.