I work in a company that creates (admittedly crappy) product for sysadmins (I have no say in design though, so don't blame that on me). I work in the infra / automation, so close to sysadmin, but not quite.

So, this isn't a foreign world to me... I still don't think that:

1. Starting a service is a big issue in general (most of the time this happens automatically anyways).

2. The command syntax of systemcl is defective in any way. Of all things that might be problematic with systemd, this is just not in the list at all. It's such a bizarre complaint to have... kind of like arguing whether "gray" or "grey" is the right way to spell it. Really, it's a whatever. There are much larger issues, even when it comes to comfort, not functionality of systemd tools. Like, for example, the autogenerated names of device units. I hate trying to recall the rules for writing these, and on top of that, having to escape characters just to type the unit's name. That's just a ridiculous design.

Ah yes, famously one can only be a sysadmin if they're unable to use a different cli verb order.

Come on now. Either present a real argument or accept the fact that tooling isn't forever going to be frozen to what you used in your 20's. Newer tooling uses newer best practices and the improved verb order is part of that.