It's not silly at all.
I've been repeatedly burned by systemd, both on machines I've administered and on appliances. In every situation, the right fix was either "switch distros" or "burn developer-months of work in a fire drill".
In fact, I just decided to go with FreeBSD instead of proxmox specifically because proxmox requires systemd. The last N systemd machines I've had the misfortune to touch were broken due to various systemd related issues. (For large values of N.)
I assume that means anything built on top of it is flaky + not stable enough for production use.
It absolutely is silly. I’ve been responsible for managing low-thousands of Linux servers with systemd and it’s standardized a lot of things that otherwise would’ve been a lot of bespoke scripts.
I have never really understood the systemd hate. It sure as hell beat the sorcery that was managing init.d scripts for everything.
I managed the distro upgrade on hundreds of remotely-managed nodes, porting our kiosk appliance from a pre-systemd debian to a post-systemd debian, and out of all the headaches we suffered systemd was not one of them, short of a few quirks we caught in our development process. It pretty much just worked and the services it provided made that upgrade so much easier.
Curious how you got burned, I hear a lot of complaining but haven't seen a lot of evidence