I have long had a switch to pangolin for my homelab services on the roadmap. Can you explain what you mean with internal connections making more sense?

It uses a completely different paradigm of process chaining and management than POSIX and the underlying Unix architecture.

I think that’s exactly it for most people. The socket, mount, timer unit files; the path/socket activations; the After=, Wants=, Requires= dependency graph, and the overall architecture as a more unified ‘event’ manager are what feels really different than most everything else in the Linux world.

That coupled with the ini-style VerboseConfigurationNamesForThatOneThing and the binary journals made me choose a non-systemd distro for personal use - where I can tinker around and it all feels nice and unix-y. On the other hand I am really thankful to have systemd in the server space and for professional work.