What's wrong with services.msc on a Windows Server machine? Any serious answers from people who actually used it?
In windows nothing because it fits the windows way of doing thing but it is horrible when you have a OS based on the UNIX philosophy, well not so much. The Unix design philosophy as described by Doug McIlroy (the hacker that wrote the unix pipes)
(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.
(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input. (later he summarized this as "Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface")
(iii) Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
SystemD violates every single tenet of Unix system design, for no benefit.
Instead of doing one thing start a system like System V init, SystemD takes the kitchen sink approach and does many things badly.
instead of using interoperable text streams for output log and debugging the use a binary format.
They now can't throw out all of there brokenness like rule 3 says because they didn't fallow the other rules, because sytemD is also cron and also a volume manager, network manager, handles disc encryption, handles power management... throwing it out means instead of having to replace/fix one small broken util they have to redo everything.
Then there is the developer community from SystemD that blames all there bugs of others or just tell people to get over it. It has gotten so bad the Linus Torvalds has had to ban code from Pottering the head Dev of SystemD because it keeps breaking shit. There is nothing good coming of SystemD.