That aside, systemd is a genuinely terrible software project and a genuinely terrible init system.

Just FYI, before my experience of 5 days a week dealing with systemd, I thought people who disliked it were just exaggerating or wanting to be "different". I assumed most hate it was getting was undeserved. My professional experience made it absolutely clear to me that every piece of hate it is getting is well deserved. It is bad software all around, terrible design decisions, completely unpredictable, hard to debug and all around very poorly integrated into the rest of the system.