Why does it matter that it's 25 binaries on disk? Surely the logical structure matters way more than the filesystem structure. Is Windows 3000 pieces of software because there are 3000 executables in system32?
How many pieces of software is nginx or Apache, where every feature is an optional plugin?
E.g. explorer.exe is not replaceable on windows so the display server and that is one software. (The kernel is NOT though, because it can surely run in a headless way). It's not that hard of a concept..
You can absolutely run systemd-init without systemd-journald, and some distros do.