I don't hate it now, though I did when it first came out, as it borked my system on several occasions. I'm still not a fan, but it works so eh.

One borkage was that the behavior of fstab changed, so if there was e.g. a USB drive in fstab which was not connected at startup, the system would refuse to boot without some (previously not required) flags in fstab. This is not a big deal for a personal laptop, but for my headless server, was a real pain. The systemd behavior is arguably the right one, but it broke systems in the process. Which is somewhat antithetical to, say, Linus Torvalds' approach to kernel development ("do not break user space").

It also changed the default behavior of halt

now, it changed it to the "correct" behavior, but again...it broke/adversely affected existing usage patterns, even if it was ultimately in the right.

In addition to all of this, binary logs are very un-UNIXy, and the monolithic/do-everything model feels more like Windows than *NIX.