memes

My god, is systemd ever a piece of crap. Coupled with ‘consistent[ha!] naming’ it’s the single most likely thing to cause a field engineer to scream into the partially-lit datacenter in abject rage and hate. Even more if they remember how fucking sysVinit actually delivered on the promise. Even more if they still remember how well inittab Just Worked.

I agree with everything you've said, but this paragraph in particular resonated. We used to have a clean, simple, and predictable, system. Now we have exciting race conditions, a massively over complicated monolith ("but it's not", I hear the Lennart's fans scream, "you can just install the bits you want". To them I say "Try it. You'll soon wish for the sweet release of death. Install a good init system instead"), and once simple tasks being swamped by poorly designed tooling.

I'd say the entire design of it is badly thought out, but that implies there was much though given to it's design at all. It seems more like it simply coagulated. As another commenter said, it's become popular because it makes the disto builders' lives easier, not because it's better, and that leaves everyone actually using the thing in the lurch.