replaces basically everything touching kernel and whatnot. It is also a service management and monitoring framework[...] It takes what worked and everybody knows (mostly written in shell), and replaces it with binary blobs (binary programs, written in C).
And why is that bad?
Futhermore, the shell is just a wrapper that is using those evil binary blobs (the bash, start-stop-daemon, etc.). What systemd is doing is just replacing that shell wrapper with a declarative syntax.
It is authored by the same guy who created PulseAudio
PA runs now on every desktop Linux system and is adopted now as the standard sound daemon. So, stop whining.
GNOME can shutdown or restart computer smoothly.
GNOME does not depend on systemd being PID 1. Gnome runs fine in sysvinit because of systemd-shism.
Stop with the FUD already. Almost every critique of systemd is unfounded.