Any sufficiently large codebase that runs an operating system will have security exploits eventually, so finding an example of this really doesn’t change anything. I am sure FreeBSD has had security issues in the past.
I am hardly a super genius and I really didn’t find systemd very hard at all to do most of the stuff I wanted. Everyone complains about it being complicated but an idiot like me has been able to figure out how to make my own services and timers and set the order of boot priorities and all that fun stuff. I really think people are exaggerating about the difficulty of it.
I think you misunderstand the issue being raised, hence your confusion. The "difficulty" isn't the individual facets of the system, but piercing the opaqueness of the entire picture without wholly specializing into it. On the very basis of using a configuration DSL loaded with strange quirks, the init system part of systemd alone is already asking to take up more space in your head than an init system reasonably should. Having to memorize a completely different set of string expansion behaviors, for example, and all the edge-cases that introduces at the boundary of shell scripts. One small example, and only of the tiny slice that is the init part of systemd. We can talk all day about the problems with resolved, udevd, logind, and so on.
None of these issues are "difficult" and perhaps that is why you think people are "exaggerating" and engaging in bad faith. I would challenge you on this and suggest you haven't seriously interrogated the idea that the standpoint against systemd has a firm basis in reality. Have you ever asked the question "Why?" and sought to produce an answer that frames the position in a reasonable light? Until you find that foundation, you won't understand the position.
systemd solves problems that are not easily solvable in the old SysV init way. If you need resources to load in a specific order, for example, it’s trivial to do this with systemd, but you have to muck with weird symlink stuff to get the same effect with SysV. There are lots of things like that. You can hand wave this away and act like it’s not important, but it absolutely can be important to correctly make sure services load in the right order, and being abke to designate dependencies if services.
Of course I have run non-systemd distros, like Ubuntu (back when it used upstart), Gentoo, and of course FreeBSD (yes I know it’s not a Linux distro but close enough for this particular point), so it’s not like non-systemd stuff is foreign to me, and I am just not convinced it is actually causing more headaches than other systems.
I am hardly a super genius and I really didn’t find systemd very hard at all to do most of the stuff I wanted. Everyone complains about it being complicated but an idiot like me has been able to figure out how to make my own services and timers and set the order of boot priorities and all that fun stuff. I really think people are exaggerating about the difficulty of it.