My understanding is that the reason it started replacing other services is that there's a dependency graph that ends up pulling them in, and very early in the boot process depending on configuration[1]. That, and in some cases the available solution did not support their needs[2] (which might have been solved better through upstream work, or maybe not, if the targeted project was slow or unwilling, I'm not sure).

1: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-Ma...

2: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6kdcme/why_does_syst...

Yes, that's a design problem due to what the systemd main author believes to be a good thing.

systemd can be used without most of these things. systemd as a project has other services in but those you can use or not use.

And the claim that they are 'inferior solutions' is just absolutely false in most cases. It often replaced horrible old tools that haven't been updated in 30 years. It often provides far better interfaces and tooling then the existing solutions.

The DNS resolver seems to break DNS, the time system no longer acts as a server

This isn't necessarily a problem with the systemd project, it's more on the distros that bundle these service, but when you have the same branding across multiple systems, you have to take the bad with the good.

Had they called it "multidnsd" or "ntpclientd" then people wouldn't think "systemd sucks because when MyDistro 9 came along", they've blame multidnsd and let the systemd init system stand on it's own.

I don't recall the DNS resolver actually breaking DNS without it being fixed. And I'm not sure why most systems need NTP to run as a server.

You can always disable them at runtime or during compile and use your own though.