Do we have to bring this up again? It's just boring.
systemd is here and it isn't going anywhere soon. It's an improvement over SysV, but the core init system is arguably less well-designed than some of the other options that were on the table 10 years ago when its adoption started. The systemd userspace ecosystem has significantly stifled development of alternatives that provide equivalent functionality, which has led to less experimentation and innovation in those areas. In many cases those systemd add-on services provide less functionality than what they have replaced, but are adopted simply because they are part of the systemd ecosystem. The core unit file format is verbose and somewhat awkward, and the *ctl utilities are messy and sometimes unfriendly.
Like most Red Hat-originated software written in the last 15 years, it valiantly attempts to solve real problems with Linux, and mostly achieves that, but there are enough corner cases and short-sighted design decisions that it ends up being mediocre and somewhat annoying.
Personally I hope that someone comes along and takes the lessons learned and rewrites it, much like Pulseaudio has been replaced by Pipewire. Perhaps if someone decides it needs rewriting in Rust?
Pulumi code ends up looking like a DSL anyway with all the stuff you end up using from the top-level pulumi package to do anything vaguely complicated.
Only now, compared with Terraform, you need to worry about resource ordering and program flow, because when you have a dependency between resources, the resource object you depend on has to be instantiated (within the program flow, I mean - Pulumi handles calculating the ordering of actual cloud resource creation) before the dependent resource. This gets old really quickly if you're iterating on a module that creates more than a few interdependent resources. So much cut, paste, reorder. FWIW CDK has the same issue, and for the same reason - because it's using a general-purpose programming language to model a domain which it doesn't fit all that well.
I like Pulumi and it's got a lot going for it, especially if you have complex infrastructure requirements. You get a bunch of little quality of life enhancements that I wish Terraform would adopt, like cloud state management by default, and a built-in mechanism for managing secrets in a sane way. Python/TypeScript etc. modules are much more flexible than Terraform modules, and really help with building large chunks of reusable infrastructure. The extra programmability can be useful, though you need to be extra-careful of side-effects. You get more power, but you also get some extra work.
But for most people deploying a bit - or even quite a lot - of cloud infrastructure, Terraform is honestly just easier. It's usually some fairly simple declarative config with some values passed from one resource to another, and a small amount of variation that might require some limited programmability. Which is exactly what Terraform targets with HCL. It's clear to me that Pulumi sees this too, since they introduced the YAML syntax later on. But IMO HCL > YAML for declarative config.