when unix reactionaries say "systemd is bloat" it puts this idea into uninformed people's heads that systemd uses a lot of CPU or RAM or something
this is patently not true. first of all, systemd is not a pile of shell scripts or based on shell scripting at all. this provides the major advantage that running systemd and systemd services does not require spawning billions of new processes, which is actually very expensive! on low end devices, complex shell scripts can take a long time to execute due to spawning lots of processes, whereas interacting with systemd services is fast since it's just C programs communicating over unix domain sockets