> It's not just an init system, it's everything below the userland. And a lot of those components are very poorly designed. And it's this big ball of mush where if you use one component, thy must use them all. It's so bad Arch does not support replacing systemd, like at all. You're totally on your own.

It's true, it's not only an init system anymore, it's also a service manager, a network manager, a DNS cache and resolver, a proper logging system (as in, with metadata, all in one place) and more.

Despite being opposed to it in the beginning, probably because it was immature at the time, I grew to love it even on Gentoo - my desktop and server OS of choice - which gives you OpenRC as a fully supported alternative:

- on my desktop, laptop and work VMs, it just works, with varying adoption of its components and services started, lazily activated if unneeded

- on my server, it simply makes sense for service auto-restart: OpenRC still requires you to manually enable support for service auto-restart ( https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC/supervise-daemon#General... ), a feature that comes built-in in systemd and without extra complexity or components, and with predictable outcomes given the unit file

- almost all modern DEs rely on systemd, because it generally improved their session handling, sandboxing, brought user (rootless) services and other features

And generally, I think the biggest win is creating a system service management platform that can be used by all distros in the same way, without having to know 5+ init systems, having different scripts for the same service for each distro. I can basically work on my own devices, on work devices, on cloud VMs, on IoT devices, and have the same behavior, across different distros and hardware.