Debian has always had a primary focus on being open source and adhering to good open source principles. It's a rare trait in the modern Linux ecosystem sadly, with so many corporate distros just trying to make a buck. Arch seems pretty good about open principles as well. I'm always going to stick to community-powered distros over ones backed by corporations and I suggest everyone who cares about FOSS do the same.
systemd is one of the best things that has happened with linux. Instead of random shell scripts that work differently on each distro, now you have a single ini conf file for your service that configures automatic restarts, sandboxing and activation in a easy to use way.
I mean a core issue is that it doesn't adhere to the unix principle of do one thing and do it well. Aside from that it essentially creates a middle layer where things can happen without you really knowing it's happening. If you haven't I'd suggest running a couple of different init systems to see what I mean.
I'm ambivalent, I like systemd because it's convenient, but I also like openrc because it's simple.
They see all the other stuff that gets packaged under the systemd name and assume it's non-optional. While many distributions do, annoyingly, ship the auxiliary packages like resolved by default, they're not required if you just want to use the init system, and honestly they kind of strike me as an attempt to supplement or replace some of the incumbent components of your average distro.
Systemd-resolved can suck my whole grundle, though.
i see you have not tried to configure and debug dynamic split dns setups that are very common in enterprise vpn world.
before systemd-resolved you had to use dnsmasq running on localhost with bunch of shell scripts to reconfigure it when vpn interfaces come and go for split horizon dns to work propperly.
now with systemd-resolved you can easily tell it what dns prefixes are handeled by what dns server and everything is nicely cleaned up after vpn goes down.