To make things worse, the opinionated nature of systemd's founder (Lennart Poettering) has meant many a sysadmin has had to fight with it in real-world usage (eg systemd-timesyncd's SNTP client not handling drift very well or systemd-networkd not handling real world DHCP fields). His responses "Don't use a computer with a clock that drifts" or "we're not supporting a non-standard field that the majority of DHCP servers use" just don't jive in the real world. The result was going to be ugly. It's not surprising that most distros ended up bundling chrony, etc.
It is not complicated at all. Recent enough versions of systemd support journal forwarding, but even without it, configuring rsyslog is extremely easy:
1. Install rsyslog
2. Create a file /etc/rsyslog.d/forwarding.conf
$ActionForwardDefaultTemplate RSYSLOG_ForwardFormat
*.* @@${your-syslog-server-here}:514
4. Profit.
Two clear problems with the init system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Init) are
- it doesn’t handle parallel startup of services (sysadmins can tweak their init scripts to speed up booting, but init doesn’t provide any assistance)
- it does not work in a world where devices get attached to and detached from computers all the time (think of USB and Bluetooth devices, WiFi networks).
The second problem was evolutionary solved in init systems by having multiple daemons doing, basically, the same thing: listen for device attachments/detachments, and handling them. Unifying that in a single daemon, IMO, is a good thing. If you accept that, making that single daemon the init process makes sense, too, as it will give you a solution for the first problem.