The thing with the whole systemd hate thing is everyone now knows why people might hate systemd (I am not a fan). I think a lot of features around isolation and systemd containers where useful but now probably using your containerization system that best suits your needs.
For me when I get really mad at it is when I want to build small nixos Images and want to minimize the footprint of systemd and run few services (some of that is on nixos as well).
I think it's better suited for desktop systems then server systems and it's quite annoying how prevalent it is. D-bus is one thing that always annoys me and how everything in systemd wants to use it and you can run into issues disabling it (Also don't like D-bus even on a desktop system).
Overall I think and hope we will see a rise not necessarily in openrc but in simpler init 1 systems that try to do less and provide good strong primitives that allow for easily using what ever daemon configured how you want, rather then trying to provide coupled implementations for everything.
Again I know these criticism are something of a meme, but they still are true.
systemd (or rather Poettering) also isn't really a fan of dbus. That is why most new IPC APIs are using Varlink (and socket activation) instead of dbus. They've also been slowly migrating some of the internal IPC calls to Varlink instead.
Systemd probably is never getting rid of the dependency of dbus due to providing public APIs via it, but maybe it can be downgraded at some point to an optional dependency where APIs are registered if it is installed and just skipped if not.
True and he is right, but it's still a dependency on systemd, Varlink is some ways better, (giving much more control over listening and control over what receives messages) but the point still stands I don't want my init system to depend on this kind of userspace IPC mechanism or have to provide this, especially on systems I want to lock down.