> If systemd (the project) were truly a collection of modular components you could pick and choose, you wouldn't need journald and you'd be able to run syslog like it's the 90s.

Journald and udevd are exactly the only piece of systemd that systemd's pid 1 requires, and udevd can be used independent of systemd's pid 1.

I just think of journald as a piece of the init system that is split to a separate process, and provides log data to other programs.