> If you requested this 5 years ago every would think you were crazy...
That's a straw man. Nobody was ever pushing for people to import all of libsystemd just to use the communication protocol with systemd, that protocol was designed to be very easy and simple to implement on your own precisely so you didn't have to depend on anything else, libsystemd just happened to provide an implementation too, and somebody was lazy and imported that instead, but I seriously doubt that's what anyone thought was best practice.
Contrary to popular belief, systemd isn't about linking gigantic binaries and libraries together into a giant blob like everyone things (e.g. the standard nonsense line from detractors that e.g. `systemd-resolved` is "part of systemd" as in "part of the same binary", which it isn't), but about just letting programs talk to each other, so that you can get reliable, featureful integration on your desktop instead of everything being a half-working mess of shims and ad hoc communication, and providing a centralized service that can consistently and from first principles solve certain tasks, so that you don't have to have every single daemon reimplementing their own, or a central implementation that's a big pile of preprocessed shell scripts, spinlocks, edge cases, and bullshit.
> Same as the suckless people. They were right after all.
Right about what? Right in myopically judging software quality by "lines of code" and setting nonsensical arbitrary line limits, and as a consequence confusing a (poor) map for the territory, because while, yes, "few lines of code" can make software good in some ways (less buggy, etc), it can also make it quite bad in others (less featureful, doesn't handle edge cases, brittle, annoying to use), or just be completely unrelated? Or finding every possible way to vrware software that most definitely "sucks more" for the vast majority of users that don't randomly happen to perfectly align with it, software that sucks so bad people have to maintain patch lists to make it useable, with all the inherent problems with maintainability and stability over time patches incur?
Suckless is a cargo cult of tradition following a fundamentalist interpretation of its holy texts, refusing to innovate and actually make computing better, stubbornly sticking to a model left unchanged since the 70s, which wasn't even that great back then, and proud of it.