Yea it's pretty bad. I only use Gentoo, Void and Alpine on my systems .. and someone recently got a lot of patches merged in to get systemd working on musl, so it won't be long there (PostmarketOS, an Alpine derivative, already has a systemd option).

I can agree Linux could have needed a better management layer. Systemd is not it. The target file service structure is fucking awful. The command line tooling is shit. None of the journalctl or systemctl options are intuitive. Why the hell do we need resolverd? It's nothing but failing DNS queries.

dbus + NetworkManager + other modular stuff you can drop in is way better. systemd has modules, but all of them are required, none are optional and you can't just replace pieces of it. It's a god awful mess. People have tried to make alternative replacements and they can't because it's just too massive.