> the reason to use Devuan is hard calculated costs. We are a small team at ungleich and we simply don't have the time to fix problems caused by systemd on a daily basis.

They lament

> servers that don't boot, that don't reboot or systemd-resolved that constantly interferes with our core network configuration

Using systemd was costing them too much. Moving back to the previous init system looks like a rational choice for them.

My experience is different but I only manage a handful of virtual servers and not on a daily basis, plus my laptop. Systemd configuration files are not difficult to write and they restart the daemons if they crash. For complex stuff I make systemd run a bash script that eventually executes a daemon, kind of cheating. My laptop still runs well. Booting time is definitely not an issue, it went from fast once per month or so (kernel upgrades), to fast still once per month so. I didn't notice any difference after the change of the init system. A good thing but maybe it means that the return on investment was dubious for this use case.

Binary log files are objectively worse than text ones. cat, less and tail were good enough and shorter to type than journalctl. Ok, I could alias it to a four characters word but it was still a lot of work that could have been invested on some other goal. Instead I've got servers with possibly compact binary logs made of very few lines and large text logs from web applications.

I'm also puzzled by the philosophy of bundling more things together and tighten dependencies. It's somewhat disconcerting and I'd like a system where we could swap components out more freely, but this is an opinion and not facts.