The people who say "it's not that bad" are those who haven't interacted with these extremely reliable and integral parts of a Unix system for years and years and understand the ramifications of bad behavior.

The author of this article has done so, and seems to think that until this syslog interaction it hasn't been too bad:

> One of systemd's strengths until now has been that it played relatively well (sometimes extremely well) with existing systems, warts and all.