I'm not a linux power user but have some servers running on linux and honestly wouldn't change it with anything else, as everything runs smooth and maintainance is easy and straight forward. Even if something gets fucked there is a great online community which helped me out everytime.
That said, and sorry for the long introduction:
I read a lot systemd memes in the last weeks: What is the problem with it and why is it trending now?
Nothing new. Nothing recent. Just people being scared of something because they don't know how it works or because it's relatively new.
Major distros have started adopting it in recent years. It's one of many ways for a distro to manage which services are running. Many of the others are essentially a hodgepodge of shell scripts.
systemd provides a lot of flexibility with service dependencies and logging, amount other things. It has a standard way to have user-scoped services. It's standardizes filtering logs for specific services.
basicly people complaining about what they don't understand, that it don't follow unix philosophy, when that philosophy was created 50 years ago, any way,etc, if systemd wasn't good anyone could have adopted it, and everyone did, beause it easier, it's faster and it work
I'm neither a systemd fan nor a hater, but in my experience not even enterprise linux distributors can get it to work correctly all the time.
That tells me that maybe it is too complicated.
Sysinit was basically one file where you tell a process what to do, start, reload, stop. Systems is way way more complicated and according to some, prone to breaking.
It's funny, after your first sentence, I thought “yeah, that's exactly the problem. Copy&paste fragile shell code for managing processes instead of standardized lifecycle management”. Then your second sentence painted that horrible mess as “less complicated”