I have no philosophy issue with systemd. The biggest show-stopper (on embedded Linux) for me is its install size. We have edge devices with only 64M RAM and 128M NAND flash. For an OTA update (via Bluetooth sometimes) only ~20M in total, adding ~5M systemd plus its dependencies doesn't make sense. 5MiB is roughly equivalent to the entire Linux kernel image on those devices.
Among the components of systemd, the part that has the lowest added value for our use is dbus. It's designed primarily for desktops and useless for most of our systems, but unfortunately, it is also a hard requirement for systemd.
Among the components of systemd, the part that has the lowest added value for our use is dbus. It's designed primarily for desktops and useless for most of our systems, but unfortunately, it is also a hard requirement for systemd.