The goal of systemd as an *init system* is not the same thing as the goal of some of the systemd umbrella projects, and they shouldn't be conflated. systemd as an init system is leaps and bounds ahead of sysvinit, openrc, and upstart for distro maintainers, large scale sysadmins, etc. No more need for supervisord, random scripts to flag off and on was part of VPN connection, convoluted "meta" scripts which carefully restart 5 different services in the same order and a huge mess of shell.

That said, no, Lennart did not/does not do things that way on his personal laptop. His position is that users shouldn't need to know how to configure dnsmasq to have a local caching DNS server, that 99% of the options for dhcpcd aren't used by 99% of users (who are perfectly happy to simply get an address in a fraction of the time), that most users don't need to know how to configure /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* or /etc/network/interfaces/* for their use case.

If you do, you can disable those things. You can think this is a good opinion or a bad opinion, but at least he's pushing towards some kind of solution which isn't "RTFM". If you think his ideas are bad, propose new ones. Start a project which does it better. "Just don't change anything" is not a meaningful or productive way to design software or operating systems.