There's a pretty spectacular performance boost too. Microsoft stealing my electricity and computing power to run bloatware and analytics on data they steal from me is just too much. In the past I thought the idea of "really controlling what's going on with your computer" was just purist mambo jumbo, but windows 10 came to prove me wrong.

Migration of many distros to systemd forced many people to do exactly that ;)

Did it? I must have missed that.

There was a little bit of pain but it was nowhere near as bad as some make out. I migrated all my arch boxes at the time just fine and the main work was writing unit files -- which compared to writing init scripts was mainly trivial.

Is systemd the best init system? No. But to some of us it was an improvement over what came before it and it really hasn't given us the trouble that others claim it has given them.

I remember a colleague who ran Linux From Scratch on his laptop who was abhorred by the changes. We spent an afternoon trying to remove the stuff from an Ubuntu VM image he didn't consider necessary and a lot of it was really alien to him. As an fvwm user he really couldn't understand why almost everything needed dbus and pulseaudio. I couldn't understand a lot of the strange packaging dependencies either. And yet these are things that to me have improved real pain-points in linux distros.

Yeah, but at least you can remove it if you want.