I couldn't disagree more: I've worked with lots of embedded devices running systemd, and it solves many more problems than it introduces. The community is also quite responsive and helpful in my experience.
Memory use is irrelevant to me: every embedded Linux device I've been paid to work on in the past five years had over 1GB of RAM. If I'm on a tiny machine where I care about 8MB RSS, I'm not running Linux, I'm running Zypher or FreeRTOS.
I won't pretend there aren't occasional weird problems... but there's always a solution, here's a recent example: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/34683
Memory use is irrelevant to me: every embedded Linux device I've been paid to work on in the past five years had over 1GB of RAM. If I'm on a tiny machine where I care about 8MB RSS, I'm not running Linux, I'm running Zypher or FreeRTOS.