Systemd has over the sprouted a whole bunch of parts that fit large (cloud) scale deployments.

Where things get messy is when all you want to do is to spin up a gray box on the shelf to handle some internal data, and at that point systemd, and a whole bunch of other "plumbing" that has sprouted within the Linux ecosystem in recent years (often under the Freedesktop umbrella, even though it seems to have a ill fit on desktops), becomes a beast to wrangle into submission rather than an assistant.