Nothing new. Nothing recent. Just people being scared of something because they don't know how it works or because it's relatively new.
Major distros have started adopting it in recent years. It's one of many ways for a distro to manage which services are running. Many of the others are essentially a hodgepodge of shell scripts.
systemd provides a lot of flexibility with service dependencies and logging, amount other things. It has a standard way to have user-scoped services. It's standardizes filtering logs for specific services.
