While I can agree about some of the commands, they're still far better than what they replaced for the most part, and easy enough to wrap with aliases or little helpers if you prefer.

That said, the problem with "systemctl ls" would be that systemctl has commands to list multiple things things: units, socket, timers, dependencies, unit files, virtual machines, jobs.

I agree it's annoying that the output isn't formatted in more parsing friendly ways, though. Especially because there e.g. is an option to format the journal output in systemctl status as json -- why couldn't they do that for the main output too (indeed, I wish all tools had an option for that)