> I don't need socket activation. I don't need a separate DNS resolver in my init system
It's. Not. No idea why people keep repeating this. The DNS resolver belongs to systemd-resolved, is entirely optional and off by default. Nothing about it is in the init system.
And maybe you don't need socket activation, but there are plenty of valid use cases for it.
See: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/socket-activation.html
"systemd" is the init system, therefore anything that has it in the name is part of that init system. See also journald, which nobody mentions as being part of the init system even though it's more tied to it (is it even possible to have systemd without journald?)
If they want to change that perception, they will need to change the name (and hopefully stick a stable ABI around it, but that's unlikely to ever happen).
Entirely "optional" yet it runs by default on Arch Linux Arm. I didn't even bother disabling it because it was a lot easier to install Void Linux instead.
The DNS resolver does not belong in the init system or part of it. You just need a working resolv.conf.
Also, I'm sure journald is useful, but I've had so many problems with it. For me as a Desktop and occasional remote computing, small server user, logs are ephemeral. Something goes wrong, I can quickly grep the logs which are plain text. I didn't really feel any advantage from the modern, binary, structured logs. Also, I spent hours installing something on WSL (Linux on Windows), finding that everything works except for the systemd logs, which are empty.
The command that controls services spits out hundreds of cryptic lines, services interweaved with all kinds of other objects, when I just want to list the running services. It has too many moving parts for my taste.
I don't need socket activation. I don't need a separate DNS resolver in my init system (unrelated note: I'd love more command line/GUI tools to be able to use a separate DNS resolver, work on separate interfaces, ...!), and so on.
Even if I will never use this guy's init system, if it is even a bit successful it will mean that people will stop assuming systemd, leading to a looser coupling, more interface stability, easier porting between systems, and more choice. So I think it's a great thing he is trying.