Pervasive, yes. Deeply embedded in the distros that uses it, absolutely. And I get why people don’t like binary logs, although that isn’t exactly relevant to monolithic vs pluggable.

You seem to think that I’m arguing against your opinion that systemd is bad. I’m not. I’m arguing against the false statement that it is monolithic. It isn’t. It’s modular, like the linux kernel. If you wanted to remove every component except the init system, you could. Big pain in the ass to do that, but you could.