Also I believe the whole "violates unix principles" thing. the one in question:

Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features".

systemd just acquires more and more features. But then that was written in the 1970s. Things have changed, we have so much more going on in our computers, it's easier to delegate a bunch of housekeeping work to a single, more centralized tool.

Using OpenRC or another init system instead means you get more fine grained control, but it also means you need to choose a bunch of utilities, whereas systemd just has a lot of them out of the box. And at the end of the day that's just for power users to worry about, I suspect many end users will never be able to tell the difference between an OpenRC distro and a systemd distro given that both configure everything they need to use it.