I fundamentally agree with you; learning something new is not necessarily a bad thing. Forcing you to learn something when you're actively trying to figure something utterly unrelated out is where it gets dicey. Not everyone wants to do the "Malcom in the Middle Hal Changing a Lightbulb" routine when there's already a Very Important Thing to Fix.
The problem with systemd is that it took something that already worked perfectly fine for my needs and said "let's overengineer the everloving pants out of this! get in the car grandpa, it's time to roll!" I didn't ask for it, I have WAY more important (to me!) things to do, and it's actively running interference with that. Surely you can see that level of frustration, right?
Put another way, I'm sure it's a LOVELY bikeshed for some. Some people have wanted a bikeshed this fantastic and wonderful for a long time, and they will use this bikeshed with great joy daily.
Meanwhile, every time I'm trying to get something I actually care about done, it's like pulling teeth. Maybe I'm using it wrong, and I'll be the first to admit I have the patience of a toddler when it comes to reading the man pages. What I can DEFINITELY say, though, is that if systemd never existed my quality of life would be doubtless better than it does with it existing. That's really the only metric I need.
Like I said: definitely in old man yells at cloud territory, maybe crossed with a dash of lazy man commits to further laziness and myopic man can't see the forest for the trees. I'm not saying you are bad to like systemd, I'm saying that it made changes I didn't ask for, it didn't do it in a way that was painless and approachable without a time commitment, and I've yet to be satisfactorily convinced that the value proposition is worth it - not for my uses, at any rate.
> Now I have to type "journalctl --help" every single time I want to look at a system or daemon log, which isn't super common, and when I do need to I'm already frustrated something isn't working.
I don't think that keeping users from ever having to learn anything new is a good justification for doing things a particular way.
> I'm not a sysadmin, I don't try to be and I don't want to be, and it seems like systemd is hellbent on forcing me to be one
Personally I don't understand this sentiment. As a user I have found that systemd has made using Linux systems much simpler for me. Yes, I had to read a manual, but I don't think that is anything like "forcing me to be a sysadmin". Didn't you have to read the manual for tail at some point in the past?