That's interesting. I've never had any issues with systemd directly mainly with poorly setup default configs
I'm a big fan of a centralised place to manage services. Works super well with podman quadlets
But I'm not too invested use whatever works for you I reckon
I'm also a fan of centralized places to handle things (I prefer having just one package manager, not the package manager and flatpak and pip and god knows what else), but there are other init/service managers.
I have no horse in this race, I don't have strong feelings about it either way as long as it works. But I can't help but notice that OP skipped replying to me.
I've been using Arch since shortly before they started using systemd and literally never ran into a systemd bug.
I have no clue at this point what “bloated” means. Maybe if everything works and you don't have to hack up your own solution all the time, that's “bloat”?