I’ve been curious about this for a while. Seems so many Facebook Linux groups, Linux Subreddits, and Linux forums are littered with posts and comments slamming systemd-boot. I just don’t get it. I’ve never had issues and those who dislike it don’t seem to have a clear reason as to why they hate it so much. 
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Greybeards don’t like change and it became a meme to ‘hate’ it (much like it became a meme to be running Arch and never stop telling people about it among a certain subset of younger users), as far as I can tell from the times I’ve dug into this question myself 
There’s a lot of talk about how it breaks with ‘tradition’ because it’s a multipurpose system of interconnected tools handling multiple aspects of your system instead of being a single tool to do one job that then hands off to a long list of other single tools to do their own individual jobs, but it mostly does just seem to be griping for griping’s sake to me 
I could see an argument for “If something in it breaks and hoses your system then it hoses everything and not just the one thing you rely on it for” as being a potential issue, but at the same time for me personally I always think that if something breaks and hoses my system then I’m going to have to fix it anyway, so I’ll still be going on a troubleshooting/snapshot restoring adventure regardless.
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That’s how I see it as well. And I’m a 60-year-old “greybeard”. 
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I guess that’s one of the main reasons, besides there are folks who need to have something they can mumble on, be it Ubuntu, Manjaro, Snaps, Wayland etc.
To be honest, I have experiences both with systemd distros and non-systemd distros[1] and my opinion is that both of the options work fine. Except for automatic shutdown, which I like to run when I listen to music when getting to sleep – but still, it was the sysVinit session which would not shut down if the laptop lid was closed.
MX Linux, where the systemd session is optional ↩︎
Yes, I hate trying to relearn new latin names after botanists ‘fix’ things, darn change for change’s sake. However, I think you got it with the if this breaks then nothing works, because everything depends on it, etc.
It’s been what? 10 years since it became the middle man for everything? I think I’m getting over it.
Here is something I wrote about 4.5 years ago on the subject:
The summary is that a portion of the people who hate/fear systemd are doing so for either baseless reasons or reasons they don’t actually understand. However, there are some valid reasons to not prefer it based on personal opinions and preferences.
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Seems to be the same reason why Immutable/Atomic distributions seem to be getting a lot of hate as well, depending where you look.
I actually (rather quickly) got over my fear uncertainty and doubt of immutable distros and see that it might just be the best thing since the round wheel, with regards to the lower entry barrier for people that don’t want to understand their systems at a fairly deep level.
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But immutable distro prevents a change by definition, no? 
I’ve been using Linux for about 15 years now and it’s only in recent months I decided to give Immutable/Atomic distributions a try. I have gotten to like them and have been using one for 100 days now.
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Something a lot of these people miss is that systemd seems to be modular in nature. It comes with modules that build off systemd and interconnect with one another. If you just want, more or less, a init system, I assume systemd can do that.
User graphical applications are installed as Flatpak, command-line tools you either have to install by layering them over the base image or by installing them using Linux Homebrew. For all updates you have to reboot your system because you boot into a new image, same for if you layer packages but you can apply them live by using -A flag when installing them. If you have problems booting you can boot into a previous image without having to set that up. Only thing I have found is that it doesn’t play well if you want to run a custom kernels, but that only goes for if you care about using secure boot but that’s a whole different disussion. You can still install a custom kernel and then turn off secure boot. It’s just a different way of working, some people like it and some people hate it.
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I have tried to use these multiple times. Even giving them extended use trials.
While I see that they have some benefits, they don’t match my use case well and I just don’t find them very enjoyable to use in most cases.
For me, the best one is definitely Nixos since it is immutable while retaining flexibility but there are ecosystem problems over there unrelated to the immutability.
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The argument I hear the most is that it doesn’t abide to the Unix philosophy. you can make arguments for or against it but systemd is a suite from what I’ve read consisting of multiple components, that can be used with or without each other.
I think it has brought more standardization to Linux, because before you were using mostly different init scripts with different distributions. As for what I don’t like about it, is that because so much software has become dependent on systemd software developed for BSD can’t easily be used or ported to Linux anymore and same goes the otherway around. I think tha’ts a bit of a loss.
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Yeah they aren’t for everyone. I do really like that it comes with selinux, I tried setting that up on Arch Linux but it broke my system because it seems there are no default security policies and you have to write all of them yourself. I found that after having given them a fair try I found I don’t care so much for tweaking around with my system so much anymore, even though I still love Arch. 
I ran NixOS for a month, great distribution. I found the whole declarative configuration part really awesome but if you want to go beyond that what isn’t available to setup from what is possible than you have to learn the Nix language and I found that a bit over kill for just running my desktop.
So I’ve quite been enjoying Silverblue and I still haven’t gotten kicked from the forums here even though I don’t use Arch anymore 
As a 64-year-old white beard, I can only agree 
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I was never fond of grub and always preferred a sysd bootloader. That easy for me personally.
As you why so many hate it? I had to read for years til I understood the hate and it’s pretty easy to understand now: systemd introdudes into linux an automated underneath layer that is much more vulnerable than an init. I have seen no evidence to the contrary. But does some things better than an init that the haters won’t accept.
Everything is a trade-off. SysemD is my comfort zone, so I stay with it.
Great replies here BTW edit: and great question @UncleSpellbinder
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same
What part don’t you find enjoyable about them? I like the fact that they are boring, but I still have to get used to that to be honest because with Arch I was tweaking some of the time or trying out new software I came across and then uninstalling that software.
I enjoy having full control over all aspects of my own system.
I have different challenges with each system but specific to Fedora’s Atomic variants I just found that the immutability was generally in my way. I use lots of applications that are not available as flatpaks. I had to layer in many applications which becomes painful over time. More than that, it really bothers me to have stuff on my system I don’t need and that is somewhat unavoidable when using an image-based distro like Fedora Atomic unless you build your own images.
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