> administration differences is the most direct effect of systemd, but after learning its various compatibility layers and watchdog functions, it can be tamed to a great helper.

It's both a negative and a positive. It's a change for sure but nowadays I can log into an ArchLinux, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian,... machine and just leverage systemd instead of whatever local idiom (and its various assorted corner-cases) the distro decided to use. It's becoming the happy path of the XKCD comic about standards.