In my experience, systemd is far better and more reliable than anything else, especially if you need complex logic (ex: when this and that happen, start doing this, except when such and such are present)
Most of the problems I've seen come from trying to duplicate systemd functions: in the author example, why bother with rsyslog or network-manager?
I have also seen many people refusing to learn modern tools, instead trying to make it work with the tools they know, by disabling what works better, often with poor results.
It's like trying to keep using ifconfig and route instead of ip: you can make it work, but for say managing multiple ip on the same interface forces you to go with eth0:0 eth0:1 etc (and let's not even talk about network namespaces).
I like the various BSD and distributions like postmarket OS, but I wish they had access to modern tools instead of having to "roll my own" with scripts or make do with what they depend on