Systemd is a good init system. Better than any of the alternatives, although they’ve also come a long way since systemd first came around. It’s also a weird interconnected mess of a thousand other things that probably shouldn’t all be lumped together into a single project. Half of them are absolutely vital to the vast majority of Linux systems, and half of them are unused and neglected and no one has touched them in years, but they’re all stuck together in one weird project for some reason.
That’s kind of the exact same sort of situation xorg was in 20 years ago. I am concerned that systemd is going to turn into the next xorg, but really those concerns are the only reason most people should consider an alternative. If you don’t care about that, you probably don’t need to worry about systemd.
This isn’t really an important point or anything, but I always find it odd when people bring up sysv init when talking about systemd. That’s kind of like arguing that people should switch to Linux because Windows Vista was bad. It’s not wrong, exactly, but it is a very weird thing to bring up in 2025.