A quick look into systemd reveals that it's comprised of multiple components. For example the journal service is a separate daemon. What part of this does not align with your vision?

EDIT: looks like the "monolithic" myth has already been busted: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html

I would say the distinction between systemd and older systems is that systemd follows the "better is better" mantra of design, while older systems follow the "worse is better" mantra of design. Older systems often feel like quick hacks. For example SysV init is a collection of init scripts. Yeah it is "simple" in that the init service itself is simple, but writing the scripts themselves is anything but simple, and they are brittle as well. How often have you seen init scripts failing during startup or boot? And why must you write daemon management code over and over again your init scripts? All this does is pushing complexity out of the init service and into the scripts. Systemd is taking complexity upon itself so that the scripts can be simple.