What Red Hat does is between them and their customers, plain and simple. People can complain about freedom of choice all they want (hint, you still have it), and you, as an experienced admin, are free to plot your own course.
I don't believe Red Hat has made this move on RHEL 7 in error. I think they have a pretty good handle on their customers and their needs. From what I can see on the RHEL lists that have many professional admins, there's been no hue and cry, no sky falling, etc.
I'm not quite sure what a "veteran administrator" is that the article speaks of, but I managed a fair number of servers professionally for quite a few years and I have no problem with systemd. It works stably and well (and no a reboot is not required for most updates as the daemons can be restarted on the fly if necessary). As I've said on many occasions, I've had race conditions completely stop boot scripts in their tracks before (pre-upstart RHEL). Any talk of a binary log is a red herring, plain and simple. Running CentOS 7 right now and syslog is still there, logging away to a normal log file. If one wishes to use it, there is journald to pour through when you need greater granularity and detail in debugging a problem. That has the potential to be of tremendous value for system administrators when tracking down obscure bugs and problems. The traditional syslog is still there to satisfy the record-keeping needs of many organizations, possibly under law in some cases.
As for the unix philosophy, init systems pre-systemd hardly did just one thing and hardly did it well.
How does systemd remind you of windows? Have you actually *used* either in a system administration capacity?