I feel like it was mostly a missed opportunity to do things better; the declarative unit stuff is both over and underspecified, and for anything nontrivial, I always end up with sidecar scripts, anyway, which makes the whole thing just a game of useless boilerplate.
And then it started attempting to assimilate other daemons...
Like I said, it is what it is. But what it is is a barely competent make-work replacement for something that wasn't the worst problem in early-startup, anyway.