This is not about mindless worship, but about the fact that the UNIX design has stood the test of time for this long, and is still a solid base compared to most other operating systems. Sure, there are more modern designs that improve on security and capability (seL4/Genode/Sculpt, Fuchsia), but none are as usable or accessible as UNIX.
So when it comes to projects that teach the fundamentals of GNU/Linux, such as LFS, overwhelming the user with a large amount of user space complexity is counterproductive to that goal. I would argue that having GNOME and KDE in BLFS is largely unnecessary and distracting as well, but systemd is core to this issue. There are many other simpler alternatives to all of this software that would be more conducive to learning. Users can continue their journey with any mainstream distro if they want to get familiar with other tooling. LFS is not the right framework for building a distribution, nor should it cover all software in the ecosystem.
The first version of UNIX was released in 1971 and the first version of Windows NT in 1993. So UNIX is only about 60% older than NT. Both OSes have "stood the test of time", though one passed it with a dominant market share, whereas the other didn't. And systemd is heavily inspired by NT.
Time flies fast, faster than recycled arguments. :)
I'm confused as to which OS is the one that passed the other with dominant market share. Last I checked, Linux is everywhere, and Windows just keeps getting worse with every iteration.
I'm not sure I'd be smugly pronouncing anything about the superiority of Windows if I were a Microsoft guy today.
It's not surprising that systemd was heavily inspired by NT. That's exactly what Poettering was paid to create, by his employer Microsoft. (Oh, sorry--RedHat, and then "later" Microsoft.)
Linux is "everywhere" only if you count Android, which is not very Unix-like.
Except that it didn't, Linux has nothing to do with UNIX design, it isn't a UNIX System V in 2026.
> Linux has nothing to do with UNIX design
Respectfully, that's nonsense. Linux is directly inspired by Unix (note: lowercase) and Minix, shares many of their traits (process and user model, system calls, shells, filesystem, small tools that do "one thing well", etc.), and closely follows the POSIX standard. The fact that it's not a direct descendant of commercial Unices is irrelevant.
In fact, what you're saying here contradicts that Rob Pike quote you agree with, since Linux is from the 1990s.
But all of this is irrelevant to the main topic, which is whether systemd should be part of a project that teaches the fundamentals of GNU/Linux. I'll reiterate that it's only a distraction to this goal.
Yet, UNIX or Unix proper descendents, have replaced, or complemented their init systems, with systemd like approaches, before systemd came to be.
So is UNIX design only great when it serves the message?
I'm not familiar with what UNIX or its modern descendants have or have not implemented. But why should Linux mimic them? Linux is a Unix-like, and a standalone implementation of the POSIX standard. The init system is implementation-specific, just like other features. There has been some cross-system influence, in all directions (similar implementations of FUSE, eBPF, containers, etc.), but there's no requirement that Linux must follow what other Unices do.
If you're going to argue that Linux implementing systemd is a good idea because it's following the trend in "proper" UNIX descendants, then the same argument can be made for it following the trend of BSD-style init systems. It ultimately boils down to which direction you think is better. I'm of the opinion that simple init systems, of which there are plenty to choose from, are a better fit for the Linux ecosystem than a suite of tightly coupled components that take over the entire system. If we disagree on that, then we'll never be on the same page.