There are a lot of reasonable criticisms about the systemd family of utilities. I am very skeptical to the utility of binary logging for example. It makes an effort to guarantee integrity but does not make any guarantees and is useless in the face of an adversary.
I also have a suspicion there is a more friendly way do what PolicyKit provides, which is not at all very transparent to an administrator. You could easily trust software with privileges without realizing it. There are also concerns about the hard dependency on these utilities for GNOME, but I don't use it myself so I don't know if the concerns are valid or not.
I believe however most of the criticism centered on how udev was dropped as a separate utility, despite concerns from other developers, and the way people who tried to keep feature parity in a stand alone fork was treated. They was basically told they were regarded as downstream developers.
This is mostly water under the bridge now of course, but it makes cooperation a lot harder than it should be.
journald's Forward Secure Sealing is an easy to use integrity mechanism that was previously unavailable in text-based syslog implementations... of course it cannot prevent your adversary from deleting all the logs, but at least that can be reliably detected.
I also have a suspicion there is a more friendly way do what PolicyKit provides, which is not at all very transparent to an administrator. You could easily trust software with privileges without realizing it. There are also concerns about the hard dependency on these utilities for GNOME, but I don't use it myself so I don't know if the concerns are valid or not.
I believe however most of the criticism centered on how udev was dropped as a separate utility, despite concerns from other developers, and the way people who tried to keep feature parity in a stand alone fork was treated. They was basically told they were regarded as downstream developers.
This is mostly water under the bridge now of course, but it makes cooperation a lot harder than it should be.