When people talk about systemd being a big ole monolith against the unix philosophy this is usually what they mean. And it's just not true. Like, theres no argument to be had because systemd is many pieces of software that do one thing.

We're not talking about "when people usually", we're in this subthread and you're the only person talking about init here.

My point was there is no systemd software. Systemd is a project naming convention with many projects under its umbrella that do not rely on each other in any way.

It's sort of like saying KDE is a whole thing because it has a text editor. Uh, no - KDE is a project, Kate is a text editor part of the k applications suite, which has nothing to do with plasma, the desktop shell. You can use Kate on any shell. You can use plasma without Kate.