Ok, sorry I don’t understand the problem, beyond the loss of modularity, that you can pick and choose different components for service/network/login/logging and timers but even if they were each distinct entities, would they really be less complex as a whole ?

These core system might even be more complex if they had to accommodate modular ways of doing things instead of relying on a uniform and consistent framework between them.

I agree from something like an embed system, like this openwrt WAP system that has just 4 megs of flash for the entire thing including a very complete web user interface, 10 meg for just these core services is giganormous and systemd is inappropriate. But for the average server and desktop with so much as dozens of megs of disk space, I feel the single coherent, reliable, universal systemd is pretty great once you learn it’s basic logic. I feel it’s actually less complex to use than what came before it, more predictable, more comfortable than sysv which generally lacked structure.