Systemd is 10 years in making, and still manages to brick production servers.
The problem is not with SystemD or its coding as such, but the ideology it came with, and bad developers who push it.
The last attempts to make it saner basically reverted it back to sysvinit. So, not much difference now.
Uhm, how so?
Though, I see unfulfilled urge to give Linux "serious enterprise grade" twist, and bog everything in "serious enterprise frameworks of doom"
That is, people who underestimate the difficulty of a project are more likely to attempt it, and people who don't understand the area well are more likely to underestimate its difficulty.
« How likely is it that the prolific systemd team and tech decision makers in Linux distributions don’t have a design instinct and came up with this ball of mud full of accidental and unneeded complexity? »
is likely to be fruitful.
If people want to discuss whether systemd is well designed, it would be better to look at the design directly.
The systemd way seems to be "one tool of complexity 40 to 50 things" rather than "50 tools of complexity 1 each doing one thing".
When you only need 10 things, you only need 10 simple tools of complexity 10, rather than one tool of complexity 40.