The Cube
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Adam N above hit the nail on the head, but I'll add my own experience anyway/
Just LOOK at how much material is necessary to even TRY and explain systemd. I could, and did teach the older SystemV based Linux start up process in one 4 hour evening college classroom session - including 2 hours of lab time. systemd is what our IT shop used to call "wonderful" and that was NOT a good attribution. Look at the complex graph in this article.
My hate-hate relationship with systemd happened when I did an upgrade in place of my experimental Ubuntu desktop a couple of years ago . It intermittently failed (and still does) to start properly under systemd. Nobody could even help me TRY and figure out what was going on. When I reported it as a systemd, the response was that the distro I upgraded from was so old I should just re-install. I spent HOURS trying to understand what was going on and why it was failing. Finally just threw up and gave up.
I spent 36 years in IT: cut my teeth on 6th edition UNIX, supported UNIX workstations for many year, introduced "C" into our mainframe environment, installed RedHat 5.2 on my PC back in 1999, taught a Linux course at our local tech college for about 3 years, introduced Linux into our State agency, and learned C, C++, C#, Perl, Python, PHP and lots more just for the fun of it for various projects. I don't shy away from new stuff, but the systemd experience was so awful that that desktop has simply been turned off. I haven't used it since - at least 2 years.
My old desktop had specialized scanner software (source code modifications) to make an old SCSI Ricoh scanner run properly. My solution to that part of the problem was to find a newer scanner. All because of an intractable piece of software called systemd. I still have a Linux firewall and a Linux machine that runs my weather station, but those are much simpler startup setups, and would only take a day to reinstall.
The thing that really set me off on systemd was something I have seen in In other open source groups. Ubuntu (now with systemd), KiCAD, MySQL, Folding@Home, WordPress -- I use them all. And I have had a *miserable* support experience with all of them when I report problems. There exists a kind of *arrogance* that if you are not totally immersed in whatever software they are in love with they could not care less what problems you are having. Either the solution is so obvious to them that they think you are an idiot, or it is sufficiently complex that finding the solution isn't a "quick fix".
Yeesh.
Boy, did you hit the nail on the head. You might find my own experiences with systemd that highlight a lot of what you put so succinctly.
I classify systemd and the Windows Registry with a common term we used to use where I worked - I'd call them "wonderful" - and that was NOT a positive attribute. It was used with utter disdain.