I think a lot of the "improvements" are down to a religious devotion to running the same OS on laptops that we run on servers. For example, NetworkManager is a godsend on a laptop that moves around, but really painful on a server, where you might configure the network once every three or four years and really want it to come up as early in the boot process as possible.
The difference is that you can remove NetworkManager and go back to your config files on that server in a matter of minutes, but dumping systemd is, at best, a painful process sure to cause even more problems.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
