The traditional init systems suited me just fine, i saw no need to change them. If they were so bad, then they could've been fixed or replaced.

The migration to systemd felt forced. Debian surprised everyone with the change. Also systemd's development is/was backed by corporate Red Hat, their lead developer wasn't exactly loved either and is now working for Microsoft. Of course Canonical's Ubuntu adopted it as well. Overall feels like Windows' svchost.exe, hence people accusing it of vendor lock-in.

It's not just an init system, it's way waaay more. It's supposed to be modular, but good luck keeping only its PID1 in a distro that supports systemd. It breaks the "do one thing right" approach and, in practice, does take away choice which pisses me off.

I had been using Debian since Woody, but that make me change to Gentoo on my desktop which, to me, took the best path: they default to OpenRC but you're free to use systemd if you want to. That's choice. For servers i now prefer Slackware and the laptop runs Devuan whenever i boot it up.

To be fair systemd hasn't shown its ugly face in the Ubuntu VMs i'm forced to use at work.

YMMV. If you're happy with it, fine. This, of course, is only my opinion.