RCTL is a stateful database. It's not there yet, but the right solution for managing this declaratively as with anything else on a Unix platform is Ansible/salt/cfengine or something like that, not building those tools into a superset service that manages everything.

I will also add that managing disparate platforms is never a reality from experience. There are perhaps two core platforms at a company and they are migrated together in blocks, all together. For us, we have a couple of legacy Ubuntu machines that are being canned this month. Everything else is Windows 2012 R2 and FreeBSD 10.

The "systemd way" is to provide a monolithic abstraction over many things with a DBus API. It's the equivalent of adding WMI and a registry to a Unix platform i.e. it's against the fundamental tenets of the operating system. Having managed windows systems for years, this is really not something I want to see. Time will tell, but if I'm not right about that then I'll eat all three of my hats.

And yes I have experience with systemd as well through evaluation of RHEL7. Within two hours, I'd hit a wall with timedatectl enabling NTP on the machine. The steps to debug the mess were horrible and the issue eventually just spontaneously disappeared.

That's reminiscent of the stateful nature of windows which brings back many years of pain in the 1990's and 00's for me.