Indeed. If systemd were just a parallelized init system with better unit management, far more would be okay with this shift.
But that wasn't enough. They had to hijack bootloading, logging, device management, network, etc. For reasons that nobody seems to be able to actually explicate.
They want to control it all to give the best possible user experience but fail short and introduce bugs I've never had since the first day I've installed Linux in the 90s.
OpenBSD's CVS contains implementations of bootloading[1], logging[2], device management[3], network[4], etc. For the simple reason that you need all that to have a useful operating system.
Best i can tell, is a "developers developers developers" thing. The goal is to present a set of APIs that abstract away the underlying OS.
Sadly though this has been done multiple times over, but then discarded because of CADT.
Pop over to Freedesktop.org and you will find the remains of a number of discarded projects. Most of them discarded just as they are 99% feature complete and the devs face the prospect of doing janitorial maintenance.
But that wasn't enough. They had to hijack bootloading, logging, device management, network, etc. For reasons that nobody seems to be able to actually explicate.