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One of the "features" of systemd is that it allows you to boot a system without needing a shell at all. This seems like such a senseless manoeuvre that I can't help but think of it as a knee-jerk reaction to the perception of Too Much Shell in sysv init scripts.

In exactly which universe is it reasonable to assume that you have a running D-Bus service (or kdbus) and a filesystem containing unit files, all the binaries they refer to, all the libraries they link against, and all the configuration files any of them reference, but that you lack that most ubiquitous of UNIX binaries, /bin/sh?

The use case often cited for this is managing services inside a container. I don't see why the init on my desktop needs to be complicated and restricted for the sake of a feature used by a minority of people with specialised use cases. By all means, write a tool for bootstrapping containers that doesn't rely on a shell, but don't shoehorn that into a one-size-fits-all init.
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