Sure, but UNIX, with its minimalist philosophy, was - luckily for us! - not created under that slogan. With respect to quality, this slogan has always been the one driving its decrease that we see all around us today.
Sorry to say, yours is a terrible excuse. I respect that you might not like systemd, no software is perfect and systemd has many flaws, but the "think of the UNIX philosophy" is righteous nonsense that I cannot take seriously.
The real world is not black-and-white, with or against us. One of the most beloved UNIX tools, Emacs, is as far removed from the minimalist philosophy that some have decided to be UNIX's crowning achievement. It is not. Linux and UNIX have not won because we're all into minimalism, or dogmatic zealotry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Speaking of emacs, it was created outside Unix, to be later reincarnated by Stallman as part of his "GNU's Not Unix" project.
If know shell scripts you can read and adapt the former. You can keep the state in vcs without needing a compile artifact or a compiler.
How much work is it to add a bespoke feature to systemd?
It's a tradeoff for sure, but let's not pretend simplicity has no benefits.
And knowledge of Cron transfers to the bsds.
A conjecture is not automatically wrong. The point of a conjecture is to challenge someone else to prove it wrong. You'd have a hard time showing proof that systemd is niche.
And honestly, it does not break UNIX, let's be serious now. A haphazard bunch of shell scripts is not much better than a monolithic binary, and UNIX does not give a damn either way.
I do not care about dogma and philosophy, I am an engineer with software to run and deadlines to meet.