That's a curious comment. "systemd" I agree is a broken mess.
But "sudo" is essential if you're going to maintain your system. How in the world do you maintain your system (e.g. updates, apt-get, yum, etc.) without either using sudo or being root?
The old fashioned way.”su” to a root terminal. When I’m compiling I drop out of a GUI and use CLI so you have nothing open but the shell.
It's actually not that bad once you get used to it. It parallizes the startup process, and can be quite a bit quicker than initd. I've gotten to the point that I can create systemd unit files fairly easily, and can get custom processes to work on boot up pretty easily.