IME talking with our sysadmins face-to-face, I think a lot of the initial hostility was caused by emotional reactions like: This is different, I don't like it! (Don't get me wrong, it's a behavioral pattern that makes sense up to a point.). I think everybody I've spoken to actually ends up appreciating a lot of things about systemd. (But in these situations, I happened to be their employer, so that definitely biases the conversation even if these conversations weren't really about anything related to their job situation, specifically.)
I also get the impression that a big part of this is due to a lack of 'patterns' or easy recipes to get as much info as possible from the journal. Everybody can intuit the workings and benefits of a text file, but text files have drawbacks that are very subtle and hard to intuit at a visceral level. I think this is partially a lack of good defaults for journalctl. I think it would be better if it (by default) showed much more information and allowed users to turn off unwanted info.
systemd has been out for so long that I'm pretty sure we can judge it by its own merits now. As someone who maintains a few thousand servers but only uses desktop Linux on one non-primary machine, I have a lot more well-informed opinions on the trustworthiness and stability of systemd than of PulseAudio.
(And besides, my recent experience of PulseAudio has been that it's fine, and IIRC in the late '00s the primary problem with PulseAudio was that Ubuntu ran it in a non-recommended mode. I haven't actually had any problems with it recently, it just works.)
It seems like the discussion would be more informative and less flamey if we talked about systemd itself. If the team is untrustworthy, there should be numerous examples of that about systemd itself by now.