Ultimately clients pay good money for me to look after their systems, systemd or not, so I probably shouldn't grumble, but I miss the days when Linux was a clean and elegant system, without this multi-tentacled thing sitting on top of it.

I also have a sysadmin/devops/sre type career, and my impression is rather the opposite: With systemd Linux became a lot cleaner and predictable, compared to the mess of shell scripts we had before. There's never been anything clean or well-architected about shell scripts, they've always been a messy collection of not-quite-the-same languages that have all safeguards turned off by default, and it's up to the programmer to turn them on and hope they actually work. Good for one-shots and exploration in the terminal, though.

I also don't miss logrotate or finding out that some app places its logs somewhere mystical. Being able to read app logs just by knowing the service name is wonderful, as are the timestamp and boot arguments.

systemd didn't appear as just one guy's brain child, nor could it rise to the dominance it has if the way it works was as controversial or bad as it is in your opinion.

I haven't been on-call for the past few years, but my impression is that there have been fewer and fewer on-call events over my career. That's also largely on app developers and a shift to Kubernetes, but it's a generally pleasant change. There's nothing I hate more than being woken up.