Systemd, Wayland, DBus, and other modern Linux "solutions" are all problematic for the same reason: they are complex monoliths that are extremely difficult to replace, in part or in whole. Systems often won't work without them, because the entire ecosystem has grown dependent on them. You literally can't run a modern desktop without a bunch of "shims" whose sole purpose is to fake being systemd.
The best designs, sadly, don't win out. The ones that win out are the ones that serve the interests of the largest players. And the largest players are usually RedHat, Google, and other vendors, who just want to get "their" needs met and move on. They couldn't give a fig about compatibility with some other random tiny project, or an embedded device. And those people working on tiny projects aren't in the room when "standards" are decided for the entire community.
There are some hold-outs. Slackware went a long time without it, but next release will unfortunately use systemd. I've run Alpine Linux (systemd-free, so far) as my laptop OS for years. I'll probably switch to another distro that's more user friendly, is easier to contribute to. But it's embarrassing and annoying that we have to pretend to be systemd-compatible just to run a desktop. We should call it "GNU/Systemd/Linux" since it's now one big monolith.
Wayland seems like an odd entry in that list. It's mostly a strugle for people because it's not the monolith X was and now we have dozens or hundreds of different applications from different vendors to cover a subset of the functionality that was built in. In that sense X was the complex monolith that is extremely difficult to replace.
Also unlike the complaints about systemd in the article, Wayland is well suited to embedded. Automotive Grade Linux was an early adopter. It's desktop usage that has taken longer.
RELEASE_NOTES [1] contains no mention of systemd (or at least does not contain that string).
README.TXT [2] also does not contain the string "systemd"
ANNOUNCE.15.0 [3] also does not contain the string "systemd"
If such a 'note' were included in the last release (15.0) it should have been in one of the above three files. So there is nothing in the release that appears to indicate a shift to systemd.
The best designs, sadly, don't win out. The ones that win out are the ones that serve the interests of the largest players. And the largest players are usually RedHat, Google, and other vendors, who just want to get "their" needs met and move on. They couldn't give a fig about compatibility with some other random tiny project, or an embedded device. And those people working on tiny projects aren't in the room when "standards" are decided for the entire community.
There are some hold-outs. Slackware went a long time without it, but next release will unfortunately use systemd. I've run Alpine Linux (systemd-free, so far) as my laptop OS for years. I'll probably switch to another distro that's more user friendly, is easier to contribute to. But it's embarrassing and annoying that we have to pretend to be systemd-compatible just to run a desktop. We should call it "GNU/Systemd/Linux" since it's now one big monolith.