One thing to recall is that much of the complexity in systemd comes from replacing a whole bunch of dodgy, special purpose code written in shell scripts (init scripts) and in the daemons it manages (daemonization code, various kinds of racy startup dependencies, etc).
Just saying "systemd is complex" is fairly sloppy thinking; the question is, is it more or less complex than re-implementing that functionality poorly and incompatibly several dozen other times in various other daemons and startup scripts?
There's significantly less complex ways to do this sort of thing, though. One that I've been looking at implementing into a distro lately is nosh[0] (and execline[1]). Every bit of code is implemented as a separate, independent utility that can be chained together through the nosh/execlineb "shell", which does no parsing and only a tiny bit of lexing.
This way, it's easy to pick and choose what features and complexity each script needs, and the features that you don't use can't affect you. Nothing is running on your system that you don't know about, and there's no complex "magic" anywhere unless you explicitly ran a command which does magic things.
You seem to be committing Systemd Logical Fallacy #12: "The Linux kernel is complex, and you use the Linux kernel, therefore you are okay with systemd being complex too"
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