As a dev/sysadmin, systemd is barely noticeable when you think if it as an init system. When you look at the cool tricks it can do, it's more like its part of the OS than something living on top of it, providing services you'd expect a kernel to provide (albeit not a very Unix-like one, which is what makes people so mad about it).
It's a large and complex beast, doing a lot of different things that make sense in a modern server environment.
It's a large and complex beast, doing a lot of different things that make sense in a modern server environment.