I typically use what's provided by my distro, because in my experience from Fedora (heh), fighting the distro is a surefire path for pain.
Even arch has opinions, even if they're much happier to mute them in the name of choice, but it's clear that your life is better if you stick to the happy path.
While I have nothing to say about your general points - I am pretty neutral to systemd, but I really dislike how it makes porting software to BSDs harder - I have one question:
Why are you not using networkmanager on a desktop computer? I have only used networkd on a server where I needed things like MAC matching and device renaming.
Genuinely curious. On my desktop I used a wired connection, so NM is probably overkill, but I like how I can have a tray icon to manage my VPN and wireguard connections.