I have to disagree. I've written some stupidly big init.d scripts in my time. Replacing them with:

    [Unit]
    Description=My dumb script
    
    [Service]
    Exec=/usr/local/bin/dumb-script

And no longer caring about PIDs, forking, etc. has been very refreshing.

I agree, however, that systemd feels too monolithic, and I question the wisdom behind journald.