What I don't understand is how this has happened. I didn't care either way but everybody who did seemed to really fucking hate systemd. Then how come it became the default in so many distributions, with so much opposition from the community?
Since it's all open source, I think we're reasonably ok because we don't HAVE to do what the commercial distros chose to do.
The problem is if we let it become too difficult. Personally I think a thing like DBUS is needed but dbus itself is undesirable as it adds another IPC type and has no connection to the filesystem or the BSD socket interface or any of the other standard ways that interfaces can be discovered and used. It has a network effect that is not easy to avoid without accepting degradation in the UI.
The more crap we end up accepting the more difficult it becomes to be a lone developer and the more the whole system will turn towards commercial interests and away from what it started out as.