The crux of the issue, at least as I understand it, is that traditionally you’d build the system components in a way that they were interchangeable by defining some standard-ish API. While you can interchange some Systemd components, since “ststemd-xyz” is just the umbrella name of the project as a whole, so some components are completely independent, the core ones can’t really easily be swapped, and it’s only getting worse, especially as systemd is starting to become a hard requirement, a lot of people are rightfully feeling peeved. There’s a great talk made by a BSD developer that admits the virtues of Systemd while bringing the downsides, so no blind hate, you can google for the video “The tragedy of systemd”.

Amazing talk, was hoping somebody would’ve linked it and was not disappointed

I actually did that. Or well, I was planning to upgrade the Debian version and instead of doing it in place I replaced the drive (kept the old around for a while just in case) and did a clean install. I didn’t make any new backups or moved configs or anything outside what I already had, the system was back to operations faily quickly. The main reason, I have a markdown file describing every configuration and recovery step needed to get a fresh system to a fully working state in case of a disaster, and my test showed that it worked great. It does take a bit of effort to keep it up-to-date, but as shown, really worth it, and it douples as a small wiki for accumulated knowledge. I do wish to play with Ansible at some point if I have the time, but this works for now.