No doubt that it never penetrated the desktop market as many of us had hoped it might.
It did, however, serve the needs and wants of those of us who'd experienced Unix and wanted that for ourselves. Doing a vastly superior job than the Unixes that started us off in the first place. Speaking for myself, 3.4BSD, Ultrix, SunOS, Solaris, HPUX, DGUX, Irix, AIX, and probably a few others. Plus some other platforms.
The rot started to show with the GNOME Project and PulseAudio. Both introduced a tremendous amount of complexity and gratuitous change with little benefit by way of utility or ease-of-management. Systemd has largely sealed the deal.
The lack of setting on a standard desktop offering has also hurt, and for fairly complex reasons. Red Hat is a commercial success (like Microsoft before it) because of its technical shortcomings, not in spite of them -- they directly feed its revenue model. This is quite unfortunate.
I think Ubutnu made missteps, but was (and may yet be) a superior option.
OTOH, building tools for the billions is hard. I'm willing to admit that. Microsoft only barely manages, as does Apple, and both have had quite notable failures.
It seems you're suffering symptoms of Poettering Syndrome.
The key is to remove all applications he has touched (logind/systemd/NetworkManager/PulseAudio/Avahi), and you'll find yourself with a stable system.
Good distros, such as Calculate Linux or Gentoo, help a lot with this.
However, should you continue to use Red Hat-based distributions (of which Debian, Arch, and Ubuntu should be considered, post-systemd; package managers notwithstanding), you will constantly experience these pain points.
I swear to fucking god Linux has lost the beat.