Systemd said on its first website that its a system management daemon. That is where the name came from. It was never supposed to be just an init system.

No need to buy out udevd, considering the guy doing that was on board with systemd from the start and made sure that systemd-init can make maximum use of udev and the other way around... you typically do want to start stuff in response to hardware appearing and disappearing. Now they can do that safely by just asking systemd-init to manage the services. They needed to run stuff thenselves before, which pretty often ended up blocking the udev daemon from recognizing new events... a quality of live improvement for everybody involved:-)

The rest has similar stories (only run network services when the network is up, start services only after the system clock has a sane value over starting the service and then adjusting the time at some later point (which some services handle really poorly), ... . There are some damn good reasons for the stuff systemd does. That bootloader is a pretty central piece in the image by the way.

Oh, and did I mention that anyone using or talking about non-systemd methods of doing things tends to get painted as "oh that's OLD and OUTDATED and OBSOLETE, just use the systemd way it's Modern™ and good"?

That is pretty much the only thing I can agree with:-) And that is because the systemd ways are ofentimes way more robust and able to deal with corner cases way better.