What? It's like saying systemd is handing the government your info because they have a field for your real name and address.

YOU control what info goes there, if any. It mandates NOTHING.

You may as well be mad at vim because your text editor is capable of storing your birthdate if you go in and type it and save it to /public/myInfo.txt

you install a distro because of all the software it includes and how they interact out of the box

you’re completely right that systemd is a background service that most people don’t care about, but it does make the whole system more reliable, and much easier to administer for servers or workstations (enterprise management; not personal)

you certainly do want an init system… even sysv-init is an init system: you need something that runs as pid 1 that triggers other services. systemd starts services, and also ensures they’re in the correct security contexts, running as the correct users, makes sure they’re healthy, tracks dependencies (not just order; this speeds things up because it can be parallel, ensures failures don’t cascade, and means there’s far less jank in random bash scripts)

this isn’t a big political statement: this is an acknowledgment that linux users - not all, but some - will want/require something like this… and systemd user database is the place where that information is stored on modern linux systems