On the whole I don't think systemd is that much more complicated to understand than a collection of bash scripts. It's a domain-specific declarative language for dependency-based execution. At least, once you understand it, it has less gotchas than bash scripting.

It's the rest of the utilities that they're trying to couple to it that are bullshit. Starting with the journal - asking for the last few lines of the journal can take half a minute for some reason. Fortunately you can ignore those parts and just use the smart init system, i.e. you can ignore the cron replacement and run plain cron, you can ignore the nptd replacement and run plain ntpd, etc.