Ideas are just 1% if implementation. Systemd (while being a little problematic in beginning) has had huge amount of amazing work being done in it.

Doesn't mean the result is all that good.

Having dealt with it for some time now, the amount of "good idea, bad implementation" I hit is too damn high.

And it's nigh impossible to replace for various reasons, including at one point critical interfaces that various user-important programs depended on being a constant treadmill of updates, lack of documentation, and hidden dependencies on internals.

It's true. systemd has a lot of good ideas with questionable implementations. I'd love networkd if it didn't have silly decisions made.

And it has some questionable ideas with good implementations. For example, I hate the journal, but admit it is implemented well.

At the end of the day, it's about tradeoffs and using what suits the system at hand. For some people that will be systemd, and bringing systemd to Adélie and other musl libc distributions means that it can be used by those people.

Call me old-fashioned, but I also hold out hope that at least some of those questionable implementations could be fixed if only someone with the desire would write a patch and send it upstream. Bringing systemd to musl means the people in musl land that aren't knee-jerk anti-systemd maybe might be more enthused to do just that, improving it for everyone using it.

Do you have specific examples or just general grievances rehashing past claims?

Can't specific examples be rehashes of past grievances? It hasn't changed much. The log is annoying and sometimes freezes while it compresses or something, for instance. That's old.

Depends on whether its already been resolved?

Various, but don't have time to rehash all of them - the following are just things that I was either bitten by fresh or constantly suffered from in last year:

- The utterly broken in places interface (one of the worst offenders is systemctl show non-existing-unit dumping you a screenful of systemd unit parameters instead of "this unit does not exist")

- Bonkers defaults the moment you step outside of the minimum case for new unit - spent ridiculous amount of time dealing with that trying to make a self-restarting service with sane values for restart timer etc.

- Lack of documentation resulting in having to read the source code (which is horrible code, IMO), which I can only figure as being result of built-in assumption that any resource consumed by systemd is exclusively for systemd use. Which causes problems sometimes (my specific case was totally undocumented values used by systemd secrets mechanism wrt to TPM2, which caused hard to diagnose errors)

But systemd was already widely supported not even 2 or 3 years after its original release. The reason it built its network effect is because it was better. Sure, a lot of it is also due to the classic Redhat NIH and their marketing push for their own solutions regardless of if other stuff already exists, but in this specific case systemd was also very very useful from the get go.

It wasn't widely tested until it took over either.