People who don't like it can call me back when they graduate beyond ricing their i3 desktop and run a ~5k node server fleet, and then tell me how they did it without reimplementing everything systemd already does.

> run a ~5k node server fleet,

That is why RedHat wants it. What does it help on the laptop that I am writing this?

And what happens when you upgrade that fleet (unless you're doing clean installs) and sytemd-resolved is not resolving anything? (Just the most recent thing I've had)

Well the key is to always do clean-installs and join the fleet and decommission the old machines. Machines are essentially immutable and disposable, so upgrades are done with full machines. And if anything hardware goes bad on whole or sometimes half racks.