Well, here's the basic deal. If we're talking about common servers, common desktop, etc then systemd is an excellent replacement. It covers the base of users quite well.
But lets say you are building a highly specialized application. You are going to be making quite a few customizations which are far more manageable through a shell scripting environment than by customizing a bunch of binaries.
I assume that Redhat is going to cover a lot of the bases for most users out there. But for those of us in highly customized environments it's going to suck.
There are other options, in particular the Musl libc-based distros like Alpine Linux and Sabotage (where you can use busybox but dont have to). They also feel much more like the traditional BSDs - Musl libc and pkgsrc is very close to a BSD...
Systemd is too much, but often busybox is not enough. Plus if everything starts conforming to systemd, busybox will have to become like systemd to stay compatible.
It's not just GNOME; an embedded device that acts as a USB host needs something like udev, and as I recall reading systemd has swallowed the hardware plugging notification systems, or was working on it. The success of systemd in getting single-user kernel patches that only make sense for desktops and systemd is most concerning, though. Linux is great because of its modularity; previously, if init didn't make sense you could switch to openrc, upstart, or others, without having to change the way you do logging, DHCP, hardware plug events, etc.
That doesn't make systemd right for the other hundreds/thousands of embedded Linux systems. If you recall my response elsewhere in the thread, "Company X uses it" is unconvincing.
Also, it's inevitable that if systemd and software expecting to use it take over more and more aspects of userland and the kernel, vendors will be left with no choice but to use it as well. So "more vendors are switching to systemd" is not a convincing argument either. I like to make my own decisions on the basis of modularity and replaceability (vendor lockin has been a huge burden in other major projects not mentioned in my online persona), not popularity.
the pereson was asking for an example, that is all. i can't even speak for whether the jolla devices are any good. only that is it shown that is done and in shipping hardware right now, not some time in the future.
But lets say you are building a highly specialized application. You are going to be making quite a few customizations which are far more manageable through a shell scripting environment than by customizing a bunch of binaries.
I assume that Redhat is going to cover a lot of the bases for most users out there. But for those of us in highly customized environments it's going to suck.