It's a suit of a tools each doing one thing and communicating together via a message bus. How exactly is that hating the "unix philosophy" whatever that means? From where I stand, it's extremely close to the way Unix has ever done things. The design is even directly lifted from the boot system of a certified Unix.
Thus they are created out of political or ego reasons.
There's a major disconnect, I've seen, from what systemd haters proclaim and what is reality. Nobody is forcing anything, you don't have to use 99% of systemd, it's not a monolith, and many people do want the features. To be clear, this isn't my opinion - this is the truth. You can find all this out by perusing the repos and mailing list.
Really? I have yet to see one. Kids, maybe. Experiences sysadmins may appreciate systemd as PID1, but almost everything else is pure cancer.
> There's a major disconnect, I've seen, from what systemd haters proclaim and what is reality.
I can certainly agree with that.
> Nobody is forcing anything
... until distro maintainers decide to move crucial tasks to systemd-timers from cron, change resolved to systemd-resolved, switch from ntpd to whatever its called, remove sudo in favor of another systemd thing, etc. But sure, you are free to not use any. Except the only *nix thing left is the Linux kernel. Soon to be systemd-kernel.
I've been building and automating data centers for years now. Systems has greatly simplified my life. I use all of the systems tooling; timesyncd, networkd (which is actually does _more_ unlike what is stated above, go read the man page), timers (better than cron, again go read the man page) resolved.
Not only does it solve a lot of problems, the configuration file format consistent across the tools, and the configuration is consistent _across distros_. I can write large swaths of automation that just works on most modern Linux distros.
Anyway, I'm not one to argue on the Internet. But I'm absolutely tired of hearing that's it's a dumpster fire. Sure, there are legitimate complaints and use cases where it might not be a good fit, but that holds true for all software. But, there is a reason so many distros switched to it. It's objectively better than the way things were. Those of us that deal with this stuff day in and day out are not going back to the way it was.