Those &quot;separate applications&quot; are still tightly coupled to the main, and therefore they share the complexity&#x2F;attack surface concerns.<p>If your system gets pwned, does it matter to the user if it was via the &quot;systemd&quot; binary itself or by one of the official &quot;systemd-somethingd&quot; binaries (that have no other purpose other than interoperation with the main app, developed by the same people) that come with every OS using it? Had the distro maintainers not shoveled an extra ~670,000LoC down their throat, they wouldn&#x27;t have been pwned.<p>If systemd wants to replace my freaking cron, DNS, ntp, and logging daemons, and the majority of in-production deployments use the application like that, I will be evaluating the application&#x27;s complexity against how it&#x27;s used in the real world.<p>sysvinit doesn&#x27;t attempt to replace resolvconf, ntpd, crond, and syslog-ng. systemd does.