This is literally the one thing "the systemd people" -- which is to say, Red Hat -- fell back on when their backs were to the wall after having their short list of sales pitch lies refuted. If none of the other supposed benefits were benefits or actually true, at least systemd would make our systems boot faster. Red Hat leaned on this hard throughout the process which culminated in the exclusively political decision (i.e. not based on merit) by the Debian TC chairman to completely replace existing init in "the rock-solid stability distro" with such unstable, buggy, immature software.

Here's a fun project idea: Plot the boot times of machines running systemd (and some control) over time, and I'm willing to bet you'll see a substantial increase in boot time immediately subsequent to the systemd decision by the Debian TC.

But what are boot times like now compared to an init-based system after years of development?

Worse. Do you think somehow cramming more wishlist kitchen sinks into systemd made it faster?