I've seen only single case of criticism of systemd that was correct and constructive (too bad I didn't bookmark it); I don't count rants that boil down to "it's different than I'm used to", or "it has broken my broken nfs config" as plenty or well argumented.
The efi issue was indeed a bug in the devices. If was up to the manufacturer to fix it, not for other software to maintain workarounds indefinitely.