I'd argue systemd has bad, borderline incorrect design. I didn't like SysV because it caused inconsistencies and hard to understand processes. systemd fixed the inconsistencies but the rest is sort of hacked together bullshit that developers play wackamole with. That hackery is the reason it can't be used in Docker for example. It has a complicated parser for a language that's basically a DSL that doesn't really solve the problem of complexity for the user. It requires a whole slew of random non-sense to work and it feels like stars have to align perfectly for things to function. It encourages bad behavior like making everything socket activated for literally no reason.

Compared to SysV, I'll take systemd. I don't find it ideal at all though. It's serviceable... much like how Windows services are serviceable. S6 is I think what the ideal init would look like. I'm more impressed with it's execline and utilities suite but that's another story.

The only thing I think systemd did right is handling cgroups.