systemd clicked for me when I started realizing that a lot of its decisions mapped directly to Red Hat business decisions in cloud computing and containers, like their backing of Project Atomic. nspawn, the "stateless" system features through dynamic configuration population, GPT partition discovery deprecating fstab(5), having a big centralized blob journal, the embedded network management (which is mostly useful for container deployments rather than desktops) and NSS extensions, the GNOME system upgrade logic and so on.
It's theoretically meant to be general-purpose, but it really shines at virtualized deployments and some desktops because of the multi-seat integration (though logind these days has some power management features that is just as relevant for servers).
It's theoretically meant to be general-purpose, but it really shines at virtualized deployments and some desktops because of the multi-seat integration (though logind these days has some power management features that is just as relevant for servers).