It’s not systemd doing all the things completely unrelated to system initialization that it does that I have a problem with. It’s systemd doing them worse than the existing tools that do those things that the systemd equivalents replace and Lennart Poettering being completely unable to fathom why anyone would ever want to use any piece of software other than his. systemd talks big game about being modular, but makes breaking changes to how those modules communicate without warning anyone, so if you dare to be a “systemd hater” as he calls them and replace one of those modules with an equivalent he isn’t involved with, Heaven help you when he breaks the API of systemd that they hook into and the developers of your equivalent scramble to implement the binary protocol he thought up yesterday so that their alternative continues to work.
I don’t want software on my system that is managed like that. It’s the same reason I prefer Firefox over anything Chromium based.