I've never been presented with any reason as to why people dislike systemd other than "Linux is about choice", when the choices in my eyes are like having 50 cans of the same soup at the store with slightly different ingredients and half of them are expired.

My issue with the Linux ecosystem becoming heavily centralized on a few tools that most distros are built on and reducing the modularity of these tools is that it leaves most users vulnerable to attacks on their privacy (and supply chain attacks) and ability to protect themselves from capitalist surveillance when age verification and other dystopian laws take effect, and it becomes more difficult to escape from these dependencies. I also don't like systemd as much now because of the poor code quality from its heavy use of AI slop.

I get that many tools are reinventing the wheel, and developers' free time and funding are very limited, though I believe many tools still serve specific purposes better than others, and it's good to have a backup when one dev team decides to make a controversial, unethical decision that puts users in jeopardy which happens very frequently.

When people say "Linux is about choice", it does sound idealistic, but honestly I believe they are not wrong to an extent. The Linux ecosystem needs to retain its modularity, otherwise it becomes easier to exploit and enshittify like other corporate proprietary operating systems. I wouldn't care about this as much if we weren't under threat of this capitalist dominated world.