Systemd was never meant for “making init faster” - it was meant to making it correct and maintainable. That’s another added benefit that actually getting the boot dependency ordering correctly allows for parallelism beside many other benefits which will make it faster.

Also, your listed “features” are bullshit: logging in, audio, GNOME, etc have absolutely nothing to do with systemd. Even logging can still be forwarded to any log tool you would like, but having it implemented inside is a sane choice — you have to start taking logs when there is not even a file system available. You know how was it solved in the pre-systemd days? It was simply ignored!

System init is a very complex problem, systemd only gives you the essential complexity for the task.

Also RE poweroff speed: there is a single flag you can toggle to either kill lingering processes (which is usually not enabled because some hacky tools like tmux likes to live in the background and systemd killing it is bad) or wait a bit before. So yet again, systemd does the correct thing while before these were simply killed.