As someone who has been using Linux since the 90s and gone through many different unit systems, I like systemd way more than any of the past ones. It makes adding services dead simple, and is much smarter about handling dependencies and optimizing startup sequences.
The main complaints I've seen about it seem to be people that don't understand that systemd init is a separate thing from all the other systemd stuff. If you don't like all the other systemd things, you don't need to install them at all.
However, that's not really any better for privacy. There's absolutely nothing preventing someone from logging a history of the changes.