I think both have their use cases. For quick and dirty things (like manual logging/system performance), cron works just fine and is quicker to set up. For tasks that require dependencies or have to happen at very specific points in time (like immediately after the network services are started), systemd is more suited to the task.

There are of course quite a few people who dislike systemd for justifiable reasons (but I doubt it receives the disdain that SELinux does), here's a starting point:

https://ihatesystemd.com/

That said, I very much like systemd and I hope it isn't going anywhere. I think it's improved on a lot of things from the SysVinit days and I hope and believe that its shortcomings will be addressed and improved in the future.

My problem with cron for short tasks is that pretty often I forget to add logging and/or locking. And then machine runs out of resources because of all the parallel jobs, and there aren’t even any logs.

I so much more prefer people to respond with reasons than say you should use abc, why, because it’s better

I've also used crontab.guru a million times, precisely 0 for crond itself. Tons of systems use the same syntax.

So the super dismissive "systemd is better" response is kind of missing the point anyways, even with any type of legitimate justification.

except systemd will be replaced by something else soon whereas cron has been around for a while.

What is systemd being replaced by?

systemd vs initd vs upstart. I am pretty sure systemd will be gone soon too as well. Syntax is harder than upstart for example.

I'm sorry, that ship has sailed. systemd is more than just a init system at this point. Anyway, I'm also curious about what is replacing it soon.