> Starting as an init system and becoming a general API that abstracts low level kernel features seems like feature creep.

I think the initial presentation of systemd as a faster init system hurt it more than helped, because people started to think that systemd "was just an init system". And it never was really, even early on there were blog posts showing how powerful was its declarative approach. But it seems that the only blog post people remember is the "faster init" one (that even this one did more emphasis on the fact that systemd did dependencies the right way them the fact that it was fast).

> every other approach and dragging linux further away from its BSD/Illumos cousins

The way I think about systemd is that it make it closer to the approach of BSD and other *nix systems does. Portability is never something easy, specially when you're doing complicated things like power or network management. A good example is that all the different BSDs have difference between on how you manage networks, and the way it was on Linux before systemd was that *every* distro reinvented their own network management system (and each one was slightly broken in some fun way).

So what systemd does? They standardized everything. Now if your distro uses systemd-networkd, you can finally write a service that depends on a specific network topology that is portable across multiple Linux distros.

BSD don't need something like systemd because they're already tightly integrated, because the kernel and user space is both developed by the same team. Each part of a Linux user space used to be developed by different people, and it was the work of the distro to integrate everything. Now systemd provides a good foundation for many things in user space, and most distros stopped to ship their own solutions except for package management and some other integration bits that they need for their specific purposes.

So if you say to me that systemd is feature creep, it is as much feature creep them the whole FreeBSD or OpenBSD. And this just doesn't make sense.